Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| 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 |
| The Children Act | 2014 |
| Nutshell | 2016 |
| Machines Like Me | 2019 |
| Lessons | 2022 |
| What We Can Know | 2025 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| My Purple Scented Novel | 2018 |
| The Cockroach | 2019 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| First Love, Last Rites | 1975 |
| In Between the Sheets | 1978 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| Rose Blanche (With: Roberto Innocenti) | 1985 |
| The Daydreamer | 1994 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Science | 2019 |
| Between Books | 2027 |
About Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter whose books include “Atonement”, “Enduring Love” and “On Chesil Beach”. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 for “Amsterdam” and has been nominated for it six times.
McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, the son of an army officer, and spent much of his childhood in East Asia, Germany and North Africa before the family returned to England when he was twelve. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School in Suffolk, took a degree in English literature at the University of Sussex in 1970, and then studied for a master’s at the University of East Anglia, where he was able to submit creative writing in place of a critical dissertation.
His first book, the story collection “First Love, Last Rites” (1975), won the Somerset Maugham Award. A second collection and two novels, “The Cement Garden” (1978) and “The Comfort of Strangers” (1981), earned him the nickname “Ian Macabre”; both novels were later filmed. “The Child in Time” (1987), about a children’s author two years after the kidnapping of his daughter, won the Whitbread Novel Award.
“Enduring Love” (1997), about a science writer and a stalker, was filmed in 2004. “Atonement” (2001) turns on a girl’s half-innocent mistake in 1935 and its consequences through the Second World War. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and became a 2007 film directed by Joe Wright, with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. “Saturday” (2005) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and McEwan wrote the screenplay for the film of “On Chesil Beach” (2007), which starred Saoirse Ronan.
His later novels have taken on climate change in “Solar” (2010), family law in “The Children Act” (2014) and artificial intelligence in “Machines Like Me” (2019). “Lessons” followed in 2022. “What We Can Know”, published in September 2025, is set about a century in the future in a Britain partly submerged by rising seas, where an academic searches for a lost poem. McEwan was appointed a Companion of Honour in 2023. “Between Books”, the first collection of his essays, is scheduled by Jonathan Cape for May 2027.
Photo: TimDuncan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).