As a Booker Prize winner with multiple shortlistings, Ian McEwan stands among the most celebrated authors in modern literary history. With a career spanning over 50 years in print, we select some of his best works
Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan, born in Aldershot, England, is a critically acclaimed author and winner of the Booker Prize in 1998
McEwan is one of only five authors to have been nominated for the Booker Prize six times. He won the prize in 1998 with Amsterdam, was shortlisted for The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Black Dogs (1992), Atonement (2001) and On Chesil Beach (2007), and was longlisted for Saturday (2005). He won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award for The Child in Time, in 1987, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Enduring Love, in 1999. His other novels include The Cement Garden, The Innocent, Solar, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act, Nutshell, Machines Like Me and What We Can Know. He was also shortlisted, for his entire body of work, for The Man Booker International Prize 2005 and 2007.
Many of his books have been adapted for the big screen, including Atonement, which won a BAFTA for Best Film and a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture.
In 2023 he became a Companion of Honour after being recognised in the King’s first official birthday honours.
Amsterdam
Winner of The Booker Prize 1998
- By
- Ian McEwan
- Published by
- Jonathan Cape
A fragile friendship descends into hatred and revenge, in Ian McEwan’s darkly humorous Booker Prize 1998-winning novel
Other nominated books
An English couple on holiday encounter an unsettling stranger in Ian McEwan’s chilling psychological thriller about love, violence and obsession
Ian McEwan’s brooding and occasionally sinister novel hints at how personal relationships can be beset by demons unleashed in wider human conflict
A young girl’s imagination runs riot with far-reaching and devastating consequences, in Ian McEwan’s masterpiece of metafiction
A masterful Ian McEwan explores the incredible fragility of existence, as he charts one hugely eventful day in the life of a middle-aged neurosurgeon
Ian McEwan’s devastating novel about ways in which the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken
Features
- Reading guides
Reading guide: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
- Competition
Win a copy of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
- Book extract
An extract from On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
- Book recommendations
Where to start with Ian McEwan: a guide to his best books
- Book recommendations
10 Booker Prize-nominated books featuring complicated sibling relationships
- Book recommendations
The best children’s books for Christmas written by Booker Prize authors
- Book recommendations
11 Booker-nominated books with the most memorable endings
- Book recommendations
- Opinion
The 10 best films adapted from Booker-nominated novels, according to a film critic
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Eight Booker Prize-nominated books for fans of Downton Abbey
- Book recommendations