• RLF News
• Article

My Writing Life: Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany’s Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement was also made into an Oscar-winning film.

What We Can Know, his latest book, was released this week.

1. What book should every writer read?

No such book exists but I understand the question and I’ll choose something other than Ulysses or Middlemarch. Gert Hofmann’s Veilchenfeld, translated by Eric Mace-Tessler, is a masterclass in how to elaborate a restricted point of view (a child’s) while presenting a world historical disaster (the Holocaust).

2. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your writing career?

I was too agonised as a very young writer. I wish someone had told me to recognise or own up to the intense pleasure and privilege of living by one’s writing.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

In the late 70s I used to see a lot of Philip Roth. He was living in London and took a beneficent interest in my writing. In the cause of artistic freedom, he once told me that I should write “as if your parents are dead”.

4. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

The English novelist, Angus Wilson, perhaps echoing George Orwell, used to say, “Only the truth!”

5. What was the proudest moment of your writing career?

At the age of 23, receiving the latest copy of the New American Review, edited by Ted Solotaroff, and seeing myself listed on the cover with Günter Grass, Susan Sontag and Philip Roth.

6. What is your typical writing day like?

When things are rolling along, I grab every hour I can, starting around 9am, stopping to cook – the perfect diversion – and continuing into the night.

7. What are you reading right now?

Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic. Boehm argues for Israel to become eventually an open, inclusive democratic republic as the only way to attain happiness and peace for Jews and Arabs.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Book open face down.

This article originally appeared on our Substack.

You might also like: