Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He 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 Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. 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), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year.

McEwan lives in London. His most recent novel is Solar.

Random House is delighted to announce the publication of a new novel by Ian McEwan, Solar.

Solar is an engrossing and satirical novel which focuses on climate change and will be published on 18 March 2010. This story – of one man’s ambitions and self-deceptions – is a stylish new work by one of the word’s greatest living writers.

Michael Beard is in his late fifties; bald, overweight, unprepossessing – a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. An inveterate philanderer, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. When Beard’s professional and personal worlds are entwined in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself, a chance for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster.

Dan Franklin, Publisher, comments: ‘Solar is a novel about one of the most serious threats to our world – global warming – but is also very, very funny. It shows a fresh side to Ian McEwan’s work, that he’s a comic writer of genius.’

Reviews will be posted to the Ian McEwan Website's Solar webpage.

Visit your local independent bookshop to order Ian McEwan's books, or purchase them online via Waterstone's, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Nan A. Talese, Powell's, Jonathan Cape, Vintage, Random House Canada, Random House Australia, localbookshops.co.uk, or from a variety of Independent Booksellers.

Solar is also available in audio format. This unabridged 10 hour recording read by Roger Allam also features McEwan in conversation with his UK editor, Dan Franklin. It is available on CD and as a digital download.

Purchase online via Random House UK, Waterstone's, and Amazon.co.uk.

Pascal Nicklas
Ian McEwan: Art and Politics
(Univ Winter Heidelberg, 2010)
ISBN: 978-3-8253-5654-5

All his later novels have strong political undertones most drastically visualized in The Innocent (1990): Otto's mutilated corpse as an image of Berlin. In Saturday (2005), the mass rally against the Iraq War in 2003 is the background against which the Perowne's Bloomsday takes place. Similarly, in Black Dogs (1992) or Amsterdam (1998) politics are shown in their complex relationship to art which is also celebrated in The Atonement (2001).

Order a copy online via the publisher Universitätsverlag WINTER, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, or from a variety of quality Independent Booksellers.

Lynn Wells
Ian McEwan: New British Fiction
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010: 176 pages)

Order a copy online via Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or from a variety of quality Independent Booksellers.