Author whose works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim – six time nominee and winner of the Booker Prize 1998

Ian McEwan joined Cape Farewell’s 2005 Art/Science expedition, battling temperatures of -30°C just north of the 79th parallel. Since then his writing from the voyage has been shown in Cape Farewell exhibitions The Ice Garden, Art & Climate Change and Earth: Art of a changing world. He has collaborated on projects including Late at Tate, and features in several of our books and films.

His acclaimed and highly anticipated climate novel, Solar was released in March 2010, inspired by his voyage to the Arctic with Cape Farewell.

“We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime. Now we are asked to address the well-being of unborn individuals we will never meet and who, contrary to the usual terms of human interaction, will not be returning the favour…”

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan was born in 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. While completing his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, he took a creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.

His works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Among them are the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany’s Shakespeare Prize in 1999.

He has been nominated for the Booker Prize six 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). In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday. His latest novel, On Chesil Beach, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize (2007).

In March 2007 Ian McEwan joined Professor John Schellnhuber, Germany’s Chief Government Advisor on Climate, in conversation at the Bucerius Law School, Hamburg. The event, staged as part of the British Council’s Conversations series, was moderated by David Buckland, and was presented alongside the Cape Farewell exhibition Art & Climate Change.

Read A Boot Room in The Frozen North by Ian McEwan
Earth: Art of a changing world
Art & Climate Change exhibition
About the 2005 Art/Science Expedition