Ian McEwan is a bestselling novelist and Booker Prize-winning author.

He has won several prestigious awards for his work, including the Whitbread Award in 1987 for The Child in Time and the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam. He was awarded a CBE in 2000. His most recent book is Saturday (2005).

McEwan’s writing career has spanned far beyond novel writing. He has also published several plays and short story anthologies, as well as articles in the national press. Ian McEwan has an acute interest in science, and cites scientist and environmentalist E.O. Wilson as his intellectual hero. In March 2005 he participated in the Cape Farewell voyage, traveling to and broadcasting from the arctic to draw attention to climate change. As well as introducing openDemocracy’s climate change debate, McEwan has also written on the site about the Iraq war.

The son of a Scots sergeant-major, Ian McEwan grew up in the Far East, Germany and North Africa, returning to England to study English at Sussex University. He was the first student on the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA, earning enough money from the publication in The New American Review of his first short story, Homemade, to pay for a trip to Afghanistan. Ian McEwan went on to win the Somerset Maugham Award for his debut collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites (1975).

Recent articles

To address climate change and the political challenges it raises, we must harness imagination to understanding, good science to enlightened globalisation, says Ian McEwan.

President Bush has rallied his troops for what he calls “The first war of the 21st century”. What is your view of this crisis, where, briefly, do you stand? This is the question we are putting to people around the world, especially those with their own public reputation and following. Our aim, to help create a truly global debate all can identify with.

See also "Writers, artists and civic leaders on the War: Part II"