Ian McEwan

While the uninitiated may not immediately recognize Ian McEwan's name, avid readers knew he was a literary giant. McEwan's works were often considered works of genius - his 2005 novel Atonement was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923 - and undoubtedly placed him as one of the greatest British authors of the latter half of the 20th Century. He was born on June 21, 1948 to David McEwan and Rose Lillian Violet. Although he was born in Aldershot, England, his father was a non-commissioned officer of the British army who frequently travelled to military bases around the world. McEwan thus spent most of his childhood abroad in places such as East Asia, Germany, and North Africa. When his family returned to England when he was 12 years old, he attended the Woolverstone Hall School, followed by the University of Sussex where he received his degree in English literature in 1970. While he was pursuing his masters degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, McEwan began working on a collection of short stories which were eventually compiled into his first published work, First Love, Last Rites (1975). The dark themes he explored in the anthology and his other early works - his second collection of short stories titled In Between the Sheets (1978) and his two first novels The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) - earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre" within literary circles. In the mid 1980s, McEwan began to dabble into screenwriting, first with "The Ploughman's Lunch" (1983), a film that starred Jonathan Pryce and Tim Curry, followed by the made-for-TV movie "Last Day of Summer" (1984) that was based on his own original story. The moderate success of these films, as well as his third novel, The Child of Time (1987), paved the way to bigger gains in the following decades.