Audio books by Ian McEwan. McEwan was born in Aldershot in England and spent much of his childhood in East Asia, Germany and North Africa, where his Scottish army officer father, David McEwan was posted. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School, the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, where he was the first graduate of Malcolm Bradbury's pioneering creative writing course. 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, absconded with McEwan's 13-year-old son after a court in Brittany, France, ruled that the boy should be returned to his father, who had been granted sole custody over him and his 15-year-old brother. In March and April 2004, just months after the British government invited him to dinner with American First Lady Laura Bush, McEwan was denied entry into the United States by the Department of Homeland Security for not having the proper visa. After several days' publicity in the British press, McEwan was admitted because, as he quoted a customs official telling him, "We still don't want to let you in, but this is attracting a lot of unfavourable publicity." The US government later sent a letter of apology.
McEwan 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. Ian McEwan is also a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a CBE in 2000.
In 2002, Ian McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II - the story became public in 2007. The brother, a bricklayer named David Sharpe, was born six years earlier than McEwan, when his mother was married to a different man. Sharpe has the same two parents as McEwan but was born from an affair between McEwan's parents 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.
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