McEwan was born in Aldershot in England and spent much of his childhood in East Asia, Germany and North Africa, where his Scottish army officer father, David McEwan, was posted. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School, the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, where he was the first graduate of Malcolm Bradburys pioneering creative writing course.
He has been married twice. His second wife, Annalena McAfee, was formerly the editor of The Guardians Review section. In 1999, his first wife, Penny Allen, took their 13-year-old son after a court in Brittany, France, ruled that the boy should be returned to his father, who had been granted sole custody over him and his 15-year-old brother.
In 2002, Ian McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II - the story became public in 2007. The brother, a bricklayer named David Sharpe, was born six years earlier than McEwan, when his mother was married to a different man. Sharpe has the same two parents as McEwan but was born from an affair between McEwan’s parents that occurred before their marriage. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan’s mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later.
His first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed Ian Macabre.
These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about a person with de Clerambaults syndrome, is regarded by many as a masterpiece, though it was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1998, he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam.
His next novel, Atonement, received considerable high acclaim; Time Magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His next work, Saturday, follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Henry Perowne, the main character, lives in a house on a well-known square in central London, where McEwan now lives after having relocated from Oxford. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005. His most recent novel, On Chesil Beach, was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize. McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children’s fiction, and an oratorio.
As of August 2007 McEwan is writing the libretto to an opera called For You, which tells the story of a composer whose sexual and professional prowess have passed their peak. It is being composed by Michael Berkeley and is set to be performed in 2008.
