Ian McEwan

British writer, published from 1975 with a book of short stories, "First Love Last Rites" which achieved immediate recognition and acclaim. McEwan has won various awards and honorary degrees and has worked with screenplays as well as putting out seven novels and a children's story, "The Daydreamer."

Born into an army family, McEwan read English and joined the hippy trail in a dayglow camper van in the '70s. He was married to Penny Allen (then a journalist who later became a healer) from 1982 to 1995.

Fascinated by the phenomenology of evil and by innocence and regeneration through the recovery of childhood, he writes with brilliance, wit, clarity of vision and originality. The stark immediacy of his realism is sometimes shocking as he portrays nihilism, death and the sexual decay of betrayal, to the renewal of the human spirit through its journey.