Ian Russell McEwan is a renowned British novelist and screenwriter. He was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".

McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. His first two novels, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. His novel Enduring Love was adapted into a film of the same name. He won the Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). His next novel, Atonement, garnered acclaim and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film featuring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.

His later novels have included The Children Act, Nutshell, and Machines Like Me. He was awarded the 1999 Shakespeare Prize and the 2011 Jerusalem Prize.

Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Étranger (1993) for The Child in Time. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous 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), and the Los Angeles Times Prize.