Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, England, but spent much of his childhood in the Far East, Germany, and North Africa. He returned to England to attend Sussex University where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He was the first student of the MA Creative Writing course established at the University of East Anglia by novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.

McEwan is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2000.

His works, ranging from novels to short-fiction collections to screenplays, have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. His commendations include the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction three times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004).

http://www.ianmcewan.com/

Event cosponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe.