SolarAid is a British international development charity that promotes the use of solar energy to help reduce global poverty and climate change. SolarAid installs solar photovoltaic systems, for community centres, medical clinics, schools and other communal buildings. It also trains local communities in do-it-yourself solar skills. SolarAid's first project in Malawi was supported by Solarcentury, a solar energy company based in the UK.^[2]

Aims[link]

The objectives of SolarAid are:

• To relieve poverty through facilitating the provision of solar energy to those in need.
• To advance the education of the public in matters relating to solar energy, climate change, and the protection of the environment
• To carry out and disseminate the results of research into all aspects of energy generation, distribution, supply and use.^[3]

Projects[link]

SolarAid obtained charitable status in August 2006.^[4] It came out of Solarcentury, now the UK's largest solar company,^[5] when a group of volunteers there came together to launch SolarAid's first project in Malawi.^[3] Its founding Chairman was Jeremy Leggett, also Executive Chairman of Solarcentury, and its founding Executive Director was Nick Sireau.

SolarAid's second project was in southern Tanzania, with an organisation called Neema Crafts in Iringa.^[6] SolarAid trained a group of deaf and disabled people to build and sell microsolar products.

SolarAid started to expand in 2007 through funding from several sources, particularly TRAID for Malawi^[7] and the Global Cool Foundation for Zambia.^[8] These projects comprise a combination of macrosolar installations for schools and community centres, and microsolar trainings for small entrepreneurs.

Approach[link]

Microsolar[link]

SolarAid identifies entrepreneurs in developing countries, who it then trains in business planning, market research and solar skills.^[9] It helps them set up their solar microbusinesses so that they can build and sell solar lanterns and solar chargers for radios and mobile phones.^[10] SolarAid research showed that the average household in a developing country spends between 10-20% of its income on kerosene for lighting, single use batteries for their radios, and charging their mobile phones. Kerosene smoke is toxic, single use batteries are polluting, and mobile phone chargers need access to the electric grid, which most rural areas in developing countries do not have and probably will never have. SolarAid’s solar entrepreneurs convert kerosene lamps into solar lanterns using light emitting diodes (LEDs, which are cheaper, robust and use little energy) and build solar chargers from local materials and imported solar glass.^[11] These solar products can then fulfill much of the average household's energy needs, leading to a substantial increase in their income because they no longer need to buy kerosene or batteries. The solar entrepreneurs make money and reinvest their profits into their microbusinesses in order to grow.

SolarAid aims to convert every single kerosene lamp in Africa into a solar lantern.

Macrosolar[link]

SolarAid’s macrosolar work involves installing larger solar systems in schools, community centres and health clinics. Barely 2% of rural populations in most African countries have access to the grid, forcing them to rely on kerosene, candles, car batteries and firewood for fuel. Schools cannot teach in the evenings; community centres cannot offer services such as educational videos or vocational training; and health clinics cannot power basic medical equipment such as vaccine fridges. Yet a standard 300 watt system installed on the roof of a school, community centre or clinic can solve all these issues.

• In Uganda, SolarAid is installing a solar system on the community office of the Katine Project,[11] a programme run by development charity AMREF and The Guardian newspaper and funded by Barclays bank.
• In Malawi, SolarAid installed a 300 watt system on a community centre, the only place now with electricity for miles around.
• In South Africa, SolarAid installed a solar system on an orphanage.
• Over the next four years Solar Aid is starting a programme to install systems on hundreds of schools, community centres and health clinics in Tanzania and Zambia.

Support[link]

Following Solarcentury's example, a number of other companies have offered support:

• Scottish and Southern Energy provides funding and staff volunteers for SolarAid’s projects in Tanzania
• Vodafone and Global Cool provide funding for SolarAid’s Zambia programme
• Lloyds of London, through its charities trust, is helping develop SolarAid’s carbon offsetting scheme
• White & Case and Covington & Burling, two legal firms, give pro bono advice
• the City of London, through the City Bridge Trust, supports the charity’s communications activities in London.

Foundations have also provided help, from the Big Lottery Fund's grant to research setting up programmes in Tanzania and Zambia, to assistance with UK management costs from Avina Stiftung, the Sylvia Adams Trust, the Polden Puckham Foundation and others.

Launch and patronage[link]

• SolarAid launched officially in December 2007, with an event at City Hall in London presented by the Major of London Ken Livingstone.^[12] Launch of SolarAid in London More than 180 people from the energy industry, NGOs, government, African embassies, foundations and others attended.
• SolarAid has also recruited the patronage of Hollywood actress Cate Blanchett.^[13] The London premiere of her film Elizabeth II raised funds for SolarAid in October 2007 and she was interviewed in Marie Claire in June 2008 about her support for SolarAid.^[14]

See also[link]

• Renewable energy in developing countries
• UN-Energy
• Solar for all

References[link]

Cate Blanchett
Blanchett at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival
Born	Catherine Élise Blanchett (1969-05-14) 14 May 1969 (age 43) Melbourne, Australia
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1993–present
Spouse	Andrew Upton (1997–present; 3 children)
Parents	Robert DeWitt Blanchett, Jr. June Gamble

Catherine Élise "Cate" Blanchett (/ˈblɑːntʃ.ət/; born 14 May 1969) is an Academy Award–winning Australian actress. She came to international attention for her role as Elizabeth I of England in the 1998 biopic film Elizabeth, for which she won British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and Golden Globe Awards, and earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Blanchett appeared as the elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy from 2001 to 2003. In 2004, Blanchett's portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator brought her numerous awards, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Blanchett's other films include Babel (2006), Notes on a Scandal (2006), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

Blanchett's work has earned her several accolades, including a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTAs, and an Academy Award. Due to her success and character variety, critics have often called her "the new Meryl Streep" or "the Meryl Streep of the next generation".^[1][2][3]

Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, are currently artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.^[4][5]

Early life and education[link]

Blanchett was born in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe.^{[citation needed]} Her mother, June (née Gamble), was an Australian property developer and teacher, and her father, Robert DeWitt Blanchett, Jr., was a Texas native who was a US Navy Petty Officer and later worked as an advertising executive.^[6][7] The two met while Blanchett's father's ship, USS Arneb, was in Melbourne. When Blanchett was ten, she lost her father to a heart attack.^[8] She has two siblings; her older brother, Bob, is a computer systems engineer, and her younger sister, Genevieve, worked as a theatrical designer and received her Bachelor of Design in Architecture in April 2008.^[9]

Blanchett has described herself as being "part extrovert, part wallflower" during childhood.^[9] She attended a primary school in Melbourne at Ivanhoe East Primary School. For her secondary education, she attended Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar School and then Methodist Ladies' College, from which she graduated, where she explored her passion for acting.^[10] She studied economics and fine arts at the University of Melbourne before leaving Australia to travel overseas.

When she was eighteen, Blanchett went on a vacation to Egypt. A fellow guest at a hotel in Cairo asked if she wanted to be an extra in a movie, and the next day she found herself in a crowd scene cheering for an American boxer losing to an Egyptian in the film Kaboria, starring the Egyptian actor Ahmad Zaki. Blanchett returned to Australia and later moved to Sydney to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1992 and beginning her career in the theatre.^[8]

Career[link]

Her first major stage role was opposite Geoffrey Rush in the 1993 David Mamet play Oleanna, for which she won the Sydney Theatre Critics' Best Newcomer Award.^[11] She also appeared as Ophelia in an acclaimed 1994–95 Company B production of Hamlet, directed by Neil Armfield, starring Rush and Richard Roxburgh.

Blanchett appeared in the TV miniseries Heartland opposite Ernie Dingo, the miniseries Bordertown, with Hugo Weaving, and in an episode of Police Rescue entitled "The Loaded Boy". She also appeared in the 1994 telemovie of Police Rescue as a teacher taken hostage by armed bandits, and in the 50-minute drama Parklands (1996), which received a limited release in Australian cinemas. Also in 1994, she played a non-reoccurring role in an episode of the long-running Australian TV series GP, as Janie Morris, a woman living with her brother (Daniel Lapaine as Sean Morris) in a consensual incestuous relationship. Their relationship is torn apart when their mother comes to visit, and notices that only one bed appears to be slept in regularly.^[12]

Blanchett made her international film debut with a supporting role as an Australian nurse captured by the Japanese Army during World War II, in Bruce Beresford's 1997 film Paradise Road, which co-starred Glenn Close and Frances McDormand.^[8] Her first leading role, also in 1997, was as Lucinda Leplastrier, in Gillian Armstrong's production of Oscar and Lucinda, opposite Ralph Fiennes.^[8] Blanchett was nominated for her first Australian Film Institute Award as Best Leading Actress for this role, and lost out to Pamela Rabe in The Well. She did, however, win an AFI Award as Supporting Actress in the same year for her role as Lizzie in the romantic-comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie, co-starring Richard Roxburgh and Frances O'Connor.

Her first high-profile international role was as Elizabeth I of England in the 1998 movie Elizabeth, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.^[8] Blanchett lost out to Gwyneth Paltrow for her role in Shakespeare in Love, but won a British Academy Award (BAFTA) and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama. The following year, Blanchett was nominated for another BAFTA Award, for her supporting role in The Talented Mr. Ripley.^[8]

Already an acclaimed actress, Blanchett received a host of new fans when she appeared in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. She played the role of Galadriel in all three films.^[8] The trilogy holds the record as the highest grossing film trilogy of all time.^[13] In 2005, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. This made Blanchett the first person to garner an Academy Award for playing a previous Oscar-winning actor/actress.^{[citation needed]} That same year, Blanchett won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actress for her role as Tracy Heart, a recovering heroin addict in the Australian film Little Fish. Though lesser known globally than some of her other films, Little Fish received tremendous critical acclaim in Blanchett's native Australia.

Blanchett at the Berlin International Film Festival, 2007.

In 2006, she starred in Babel opposite Brad Pitt, The Good German with George Clooney and Notes on a Scandal opposite Dame Judi Dench. Blanchett received her third Academy Award nomination for her performance in the film.^[14]

In 2007, Blanchett was named as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People In The World and also one of the most successful actresses by Forbes magazine.^[15]

In 2007, she won the Volpi Cup Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe Award for portraying one of six incarnations of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' feature film I'm Not There and reprised her role as Elizabeth I in the sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age.^[16] At the 80th Academy Awards Blanchett received two Academy Award nominations; Best Actress for Elizabeth: the Golden Age and Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There, becoming the eleventh actor to receive two acting nominations in the same year and the first female actor to receive another nomination for the reprisal of a role.^[17]

She next starred in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as the villainous KGB agent Col. Dr. Irina Spalko, and in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, appearing on screen with Brad Pitt for a second time.

On 5 December 2008, Blanchett was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard in front of Grauman's Egyptian Theatre.^[18]

As of 2011, Blanchett has been featured in seven films that were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: Elizabeth (1998), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002 and 2003), The Aviator (2004), Babel (2006), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

Blanchett provided a voice for the film Ponyo,^[19] and appeared opposite Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, released on 14 May 2010. She attended the premiere of her film Hanna directed by Joe Wright at the Sydney Film Festival.^[20]

It was announced that Blanchett will reprise her role as Galadriel in Jackson's upcoming films of The Hobbit in 2012 and 2013, filmed in New Zealand.^[21]

Blanchett is set to appear in two films directed by Terrence Malick, Lawless and Knight of Cups. Both are scheduled to be filmed in 2012.^[22] She is also confirmed to star in Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, set to shoot in February 2013 in London and New York.^[23]

In 2012, Blanchett voiced the role of "Penelope" in the Family Guy episode, "Mr. and Mrs. Stewie".

Personal life[link]

Blanchett at the Berlin International Film Festival, 2005

Blanchett's husband is playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, whom she met in 1996 while she was performing in a production of The Seagull. They were married on 29 December 1997 and have three sons: Dashiell John (born 3 December 2001), Roman Robert (born 23 April 2004), and Ignatius Martin (born 13 April 2008).^{[citation needed]}

After making Brighton, England, their main family home for much of the early 2000s, she and her husband returned to their native Australia. In November 2006, Blanchett stated that this was due to a desire to decide on a permanent home for her children, and to be closer to her family as well as a sense of belonging to the Australian (theatrical) community.^[24] She and her family live in "Bulwarra", an 1877 sandstone mansion in the harbourside Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill. It was purchased for A$10.2 million in 2004 and underwent extensive renovations in 2007 in order to be made more "eco-friendly".^[25][26]

In 2006, a portrait of Cate Blanchett and family painted by McLean Edwards was a finalist in the Archibald Prize.^[27]

Blanchett is a Patron of the Sydney Film Festival.^{[citation needed]} She works as the face of SK-II, the luxury skin care brand owned by Procter & Gamble.^{[citation needed]} In 2007, Blanchett became the ambassador for the Australian Conservation Foundation's online campaign  – trying to persuade Australians to express their concerns about climate change.^{[citation needed]} She is also the Patron of the development charity SolarAid.^{[citation needed]} Opening the 2008 9th World Congress of Metropolis in Sydney, Blanchett said: "The one thing that all great cities have in common is that they are all different."^[28]

In early 2009, Blanchett appeared in a series of special edition postage stamps called "Australian Legends of the Screen", featuring Australian actors acknowledged for the "outstanding contribution they have made to Australian entertainment and culture".^[29] She, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe, and Nicole Kidman each appear twice in the series: once as themselves and once in character; Blanchett is depicted in character from Elizabeth: The Golden Age.^[29]

At the beginning of 2011, Blanchett lent her support for a Carbon Tax.^[30] She received some criticism for this, especially from conservatives.^[31]

Filmography[link]

Theatre credits[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cate Blanchett

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Cate Blanchett

• Cate Blanchett at the Internet Movie Database
• Sydney Theatre Company – The Sydney Theatre Company
• Cate Blanchett: A Life in Pictures, BAFTA webcast
• Blanchett, Cate (1969–) National Library of Australia, Trove, People and Organisation record for Cate Blanchett

Ian McEwan
Paris, 2011
Born	Ian Russell McEwan (1948-06-21) 21 June 1948 (age 64) Aldershot, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Author, screenwriter
Nationality	British
Period	1975–present
Genres	Recent history
Spouse(s)	Penny Allen (1982–1995) Annalena McAfee (1997–)
www.ianmcewan.com

Ian Russell McEwan^[1] CBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his first two novels, and earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1997, he published Enduring Love, which was made into a film. He won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). In 2001, he published Atonement, which was made into an Oscar-winning film. This was followed by Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007) and Solar (2010). In 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize.

Early life[link]

McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, on 21 June 1948, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet (née Moore).^[1] He spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father, a Scottish army officer, was posted. His family returned to England when he was twelve. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School; the University of Sussex, receiving his degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury's pioneering creative writing course.

Career[link]

McEwan's first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. He achieved notoriety in 1979 when the BBC suspended production of his play Solid Geometry because of its supposed obscenity.^[2] His second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, was published in 1978. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels, both of which were adapted into films. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre".^[3] These were followed by The Child in Time (1987), winner of the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award; The Innocent (1990); and Black Dogs (1992). McEwan has also written two children's books, Rose Blanche (1985) The Daydreamer (1994).

His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about the relationship between a science writer and a stalker, was popular with critics, although it was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize.^[4][5] It was adapted into a film in 2004. In 1998, he won the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam.^[6] His next novel, Atonement (2001), received considerable acclaim; Time magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.^[7] In 2007, the critically acclaimed movie Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in cinemas worldwide. His next work, Saturday (2005), follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005, and his novel On Chesil Beach (2007) was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize. McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children's fiction, an oratorio and a libretto titled For You with music composed by Michael Berkeley.

Solar, was published by Jonathan Cape and Doubleday in March 2010.^[8] In June 2008 at the Hay Festival, McEwan gave a surprise reading of this work-in-progress. The novel concerns "a scientist who hopes to save the planet."^[9] from the threat of climate change, with inspiration for the novel coming from a trip McEwan made in 2005 "when he was part of an expedition of artists and scientists who spent several weeks aboard a ship near the north pole to discuss environmental concerns". McEwan noted "The novel's protagonist Michael Beard has been awarded a Nobel prize for his pioneering work on physics, and has discovered that winning the coveted prize has interfered with his work".^[9] He said that the work was not a comedy: "I hate comic novels; it's like being wrestled to the ground and being tickled, being forced to laugh",^[9] instead, that it had extended comic stretches. McEwan is working on his twelfth novel, historical in nature and set in the 1970s.^[10]

In 2006 he was accused of plagiarism; specifically that a passage in Atonement (2001) closely echoed a passage from a memoir, No Time for Romance, published in 1977 by Lucilla Andrews. McEwan acknowledged using the book as a source for his work.^[11][12] McEwan had included a brief note at the end of Atonement, referring to Andrews’s autobiography, among several other works.^[13] Writing in The Guardian in November 2006, a month after Andrews' death, McEwan professed innocence of plagiarism while acknowledging his debt to the author.^[14][15][16] Several authors defended him, including John Updike, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and Thomas Pynchon.^[17][18]

Awards and honours[link]

McEwan has been nominated for the Man Booker prize six times to date, winning the Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. His other nominations were for The Comfort of Strangers (1981, Shortlisted), Black Dogs (1992, Shortlisted), Atonement (2001, Shortlisted), Saturday (2005, Longlisted), and On Chesil Beach (2007, Shortlisted). McEwan also received nominations for the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and 2007.^[19]

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a CBE in 2000.^[20] In 2005, he was the first recipient of Dickinson College's prestigious Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholar and Writers Program Award,^[21] in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 2008, McEwan was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College, London, where he used to teach English literature. In 2008, The Times named McEwan among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[22]

In 2010, McEwan received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

On 20 February 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.^[23] He accepted the prize, despite controversy^[24] and pressure from groups and individuals opposed to the Israeli government.^[25][26] McEwan responded to his critics, and specifically the group British Writers in Support of Palestine (BWISP), in a letter to The Guardian, stating in part, "There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics, and for me the emblem in this respect is Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – surely a beam of hope in a dark landscape, though denigrated by the Israeli religious right and Hamas. If BWISP is against this particular project, then clearly we have nothing more to say to each other."^[27] McEwan's acceptance speech discussed the complaints against him and provided further insight into his reasons for accepting the award.^[28] He also said he will donate the amount of the prize, "ten thousand dollars to Combatants for Peace, an organisation that brings together Israeli ex-soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters."^[28]

Personal life[link]

He has been married twice. His second wife, Annalena McAfee, was formerly the editor of The Guardian's Review section. In 1999, his first wife, Penny Allen, took their 13-year-old son to France after a court in Brittany ruled that the boy should be returned to his father, who had been granted sole custody over him and his 15-year-old brother.^[29]

In 2002, McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II; the story became public in 2007.^[30] The brother, a bricklayer named David Sharp, was born six years earlier than McEwan, when his mother was married to a different man. Sharp has the same parents as McEwan but was born from an affair between them that occurred before their marriage. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan's mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later.^[31] The brothers are in regular contact, and McEwan has written a foreword to Sharp's memoir.

Views on religion and politics[link]

In 2008, McEwan publicly spoke out against Islamism for its views on women and on homosexuality. He was quoted as saying that fundamentalist Islam wanted to create a society that he "abhorred". His comments appeared in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, to defend fellow writer Martin Amis against allegations of racism. McEwan, an atheist,^[32] said that certain streams of Christianity were "equally absurd" and that he didn't "like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others."^[33]

McEwan put forward the following statement on his official site and blog after claiming he was misinterpreted:

Certain remarks of mine to an Italian journalist have been widely misrepresented in the UK press, and on various websites. Contrary to reports, my remarks were not about Islam, but about Islamism – perhaps 'extremism' would be a better term. I grew up in a Muslim country – Libya – and have only warm memories of a dignified, tolerant and hospitable Islamic culture. I was referring in my interview to a tiny minority who preach violent jihad, who incite hatred and violence against 'infidels', apostates, Jews and homosexuals; who in their speeches and on their websites speak passionately against free thought, pluralism, democracy, unveiled women; who will tolerate no other interpretation of Islam but their own and have vilified Sufism and other strands of Islam as apostasy; who have murdered, among others, fellow Muslims by the thousands in the market places of Iraq, Algeria and in the Sudan. Countless Islamic writers, journalists and religious authorities have expressed their disgust at this extremist violence. To speak against such things is hardly 'astonishing' on my part (Independent on Sunday) or original, nor is it 'Islamophobic' and 'right wing' as one official of the Muslim Council of Britain insists, and nor is it to endorse the failures and brutalities of U.S. foreign policy. It is merely to invoke a common humanity which I hope would be shared by all religions as well as all non-believers.'^[34]

In 2008, McEwan was among a list of more than 200,000 writers of a petition to support Roberto Saviano, in exposing the Neapolitan mafia in the book Gomorrah. The petition urges Italian police to assure the full protection of Saviano from the mafia, while comparing the mob's threats against Saviano to "the tactics used by extremist religious groups".^[35]

McEwan lent his support to the campaign to release Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning after being convicted of committing adultery.^[36]

On winning the Jerusalem Prize, McEwan defended himself against criticism for accepting the prize in light of opposition to Israeli policies, saying "If you didn't go to countries whose foreign policy or domestic policy is screwed up, you'd never get out of bed".^[37][38] On accepting the honour he spoke in favour of Israel's existence, security, and freedoms^[39] while strongly attacking Hamas, as well as Israel's policies in Gaza, and the expansion of settlements,^[40] notable as the audience included political leaders such as Israeli President Shimon Peres and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. He also personally attended a protest against the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory.^[41]

In 2009 McEwan joined the 10:10 project, a movement that supports positive action on climate change by encouraging people to reduce their carbon emissions ^[42].

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

• The Cement Garden (1978)
• The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
• The Child in Time (1987)
• The Innocent (1990)
• Black Dogs (1992)
• Enduring Love (1997)
• Amsterdam (1998)
• Atonement (2001)
• Saturday (2005)
• On Chesil Beach (2007)
• Solar (2010)
• Sweet Tooth (2012)

Short story collections[link]

• First Love, Last Rites (1975)
• In Between the Sheets (1978)
• The Short Stories (1995)

Children's fiction[link]

• Rose Blanche (1985)
• The Daydreamer (1994)

Plays[link]

• The Imitation Game (1981)

Screenplays[link]

• Jack Flea's Birthday Celebration (1976)
• The Ploughman's Lunch (1985)
• Sour Sweet (1989)
• The Good Son (1993)