Ian McEwan

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Ian McEwan (2011)

Ian Russell McEwan , CBE , FRSA (born June 21, 1948 in Aldershot , England ) is a British writer.

Life

Ian McEwan is the son of a Scottish major (Aldershot is a military base) and grew up as a result of his father's transfers in Singapore and Libya, among other places . He studied English and French philology at the University of Sussex in Brighton, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English literature. During his subsequent studies to obtain a Master of Arts in English Literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Ian McEwan attended a course in creative writing with the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson . He later taught himself at the University of Sussex. Since the success of the short story collection First Love, Last Rites (1975) he has lived as a freelance writer. In the course of his career, McEwan has received almost all major awards for English-language literature.

About half of his stories were filmed, e.g. B. 2007 apology from the British director Joe Wright or 2017 Am Strand , for whom he also wrote the screenplay.

McEwan is an atheist.

family

McEwan was first married to the journalist, astrologer and naturopath Penny Allen. The marriage was divorced in 1995. He has two sons with his first wife. His second marriage is to the journalist and writer Annalena McAfee and lives in London.

In 2002, McEwan learned that he has a biological brother. It comes from an extramarital affair with his mother during World War II , who gave him up for adoption before her husband returned. After her husband fell, the mother married her previous lover three years later; Ian was born six years after his brother. It was only after her death that McEwan's mother's sister revealed the family secret.

Themes, style and impact

McEwan's early subjects included a. Adolescence, sex and sadism. Sigmund Freud , Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf should be mentioned above all among the literary models of the “chronicler of the polymorphic perverse” ; there are also literary allusions to Arthur Conan Doyle , Charles Dickens and others.

McEwan's techniques include slowly sliding (and sliding off) associations in situations where nothing extraordinary is actually happening. Geoff Dyer says McEwan has creatively brought the tradition of the British novel to the height of the 21st century.

The critic Felicitas von Lovenberg justifies the effect of McEwan's stories: His themes are "love and separation, innocence and self-knowledge", also simply the "passage of time"; his sentences would get along "without demonstrative muscle play". He loves “confronting ordinary people with unusual situations, and he always succeeds brilliantly in awakening an inkling of imminent catastrophes in the reader”. In the cement garden and Abitte he illuminates the “uncanny zone between childhood and adulthood”. The volume Ein Kind zu Zeit and the surrealist short stories in Der Tagdäumer (originally a collection of bedtime stories for his stepdaughter) also show how well McEwan empathizes with the psyche of prepubescent children and adolescents and their daydreams of power and powerlessness can.

Today McEwan develops "characters who develop social effects with their professions and who touch interesting issues of the time with their actions" and combines these actions with relationship crises. He also includes the topic of political violence (e.g. in the novel Amsterdam ).

Awards and honors

Works

Novels and short stories

Libretti

  • 1983: Or Shall We Die? ; dt. Or do we have to die? . Text for an oratorio by Michael Berkeley, Diogenes, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-257-21212-7 .
  • 2008: For You: The Libretto For Michael Berkeley's Opera ; German / English For You: Libretto for an opera by Michael Berkeley . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 3-257-06684-8 .

Plays

  • 1981: The Imitation Game

Scripts

  • 1976: Jack Flea's Birthday Celebration
  • 1985: The Plowman's Lunch
  • 1989: Soursweet , based on a novel by Timothy Mo ; German Chinese Blues .
  • 1993: The Good Son ; dt. The second face .
  • 2017: The Children Act

Film adaptations

documentary

McEwan was featured in the documentary The Root of All Evil? interviewed by Richard Dawkins . He is also featured in Richard Dawkins' documentary The Unbelievers (2013).

literature

  • Peter Childs: Contemporary novelists. British fiction since 1970. Basingstoke et al: Palgrave Macmillan 2005.
  • Lars Heiler: Regression and cultural criticism in contemporary British novels. Cultural studies of the novels of Ian McEwan, Jim Crace, Irvine Welsh and Will Self. Tübingen: Narr 2004. (= Mannheim contributions to linguistics and literary studies; 57) ISBN 3-8233-6017-5
  • David Malcolm: Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press 2002. ISBN 1-57003-436-2
  • Swantje Möller: Coming to Terms with Crisis: Disorientation and Reorientation in the Novels of Ian McEwan. Heidelberg: Winter 2011. ISBN 978-3-8253-5880-8
  • Jago Morrison: Contemporary fiction. London: Routledge 2003. ISBN 0-415-19456-3
  • Göran Nieragden: Figure representation in the novel. A narratological system based on the example of David Lodges Changing places and Ian McEwan's The child in time. Trier: WVT Trier. 1995. (= Horizonte; 18) ISBN 3-88476-165-X
  • Claudia Schemberg: Achieving "at-one-ment". Storytelling and the concept of the self in Ian McEwan's The child in time, Black dogs, Enduring love, and Atonement. Frankfurt am Main et al: Lang 2004. (= Anglo-American studies; 26) ISBN 3-631-52782-9
  • Jack Slay: Ian McEwan. New York: Twayne Publ. Et al. 1996. (= Twayne's English authors series; 518) ISBN 0-8057-4578-5
  • Astrid Wagner: Constructions of temporal experience in the contemporary British novel of the eighties. Studies on novels by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Beckett's 'Molloy' and Butor's 'L'Emploi du temps'. Trier: WVT 1996. (= Horizonte; 22) ISBN 3-88476-216-8

Individual evidence

  1. ^ [1] The New York Times, December 2, 2007
  2. ^ Novelist McEwan discovers brother. BBC News, January 17, 2007, accessed September 16, 2008 .
  3. ↑ Annalena McAfee: Dreams, Demons and a Rare Talent to Disturb , in: Financial Times, 1./2. October 1994.
  4. ↑ Who's afraid of influence? In his latest book Atonement Ian McEwan brings the British novel into the 21st century, says Geoff Dyer. in: www.theguardian.com, September 22, 2001.
  5. ↑ Flicitas von Lovenberg: Poisoned Lines. In www.faz.net, August 31, 2002.
  6. ↑ Angela Gutzeit: Ian McEwan: Kindwohl. A life choice. In: www.deutschlandfunk.de, February 15, 2015.
  7. ↑ Honorary Members: Ian McEwan. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 16, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Goethe-Institut press release of April 28, 2020: Award ceremony on Goethe's birthday on August 28: Goethe Medal 2020 for Elvira Espejo Ayca, Ian McEwan and Zukiswa Wanner , accessed on April 28, 2020
  9. ↑ Ian McEwan: "The Cockroach" - They do it because they do it , Frankfurter Rundschau from November 26, 2019, accessed November 27, 2019
  10. ^ The Plowman's Lunch. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 .
  11. ↑ Soursweet. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 .
  12. ↑ The second face. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 (Original Title: The Good Son).
  13. ↑ Butterflies. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 .
  14. ^ The Comfort of Strangers. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 .
  15. ↑ The cement garden. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 (Original title: The Cement Garden).
  16. ↑ ... and the sky stands still. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 (Original title: The Innocent).
  17. ↑ First Love, Last Rites. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 .
  18. ↑ Enduring Love. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 .
  19. ↑ Atonement. In: " IMDb ". Retrieved October 29, 2012 (original title: Atonement).

Web links

Commons : Ian McEwan  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
personal data
SURNAME McEwan, Ian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McEwan, Ian Russell (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Aldershot