The Modern Novel

Biography

I really love your work. I’ve got two of your paintings
Tony Blair, talking to Ian McEwan.

Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot in 1948. As his father was in the army, the family lived abroad much of the time. He attended the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia. He started off in the squeeze-the-pimples-fart-in-the-sheets genre of writing, so famously mocked by the late Kenneth Tynan. Most of his fellow pimple-squeezers and farters have thankfully faded away, while McEwan himself has grown up to be one of England’s finest writers, perhaps second only to J G Ballard as England’s best end-of-one-millennium-beginning-of-the-next writer. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam. He has been accused of plagiarism with several of his books, including The Cement Garden, Atonement and On Chesil Beach.

Other links

His homepage
Ian McEwan blog
Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan
McEwan: Enduring talent
Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan fools British shrinks
Only Love and Then Oblivion. Love Was All They Had to Set Against Their Murderers (McEwan on the 9/11 attacks)
Martin Amis, Ian McEwan: does the golden generation still glitter?
James Wood writes about the manipulations of Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan: Opera? Great music, terrible plots
The originality of the species (article by McEwan)
Interview
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Interview (On the 9/11 attacks)
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Accusations of plagiarism

Warning: the words you are about to read may be stolen
What Did Ian McEwan Do?
Recluse speaks out to defend McEwan
An inspiration, yes. Did I copy from another author? No