Ian Russell McEwan, CBE, FRSA, FRSL, (born 21 June 1948) is a Booker Prize-winning English novelist and screenwriter.

McEwan was born in Aldershot, the son of Rose Lilian Violet (née Moore) and David McEwan. He spent much of his childhood in East Asia, Germany and North Africa, where his father, a Scottish army officer, 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.

McEwan's first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre." These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s.