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. McEwan's 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; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction three 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 novel On Chesil Beach, was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and winner of the British Book Awards Book of the Year and Author of the Year Awards. Solar, a satirical novel focusing on climate change was the winner of the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Sweet Tooth was published in 2012 by Jonathan Cape, followed in 2014 by The Children Act. Nutshell was published in 2016 and a novella My Purple Scented Novel followed in 2018. His novel Machines Like Me was published by Vintage in 2019 and in paperback in 2020 followed by the novella The Cockroach.