A profile of the English novelist Ian McEwan, whose book Amsterdam won the Booker Prize for Fiction, and whose novel Atonement has been filmed with Keira Knightley

Ian McEwan has never been a stranger to literary controversy. His first book, the short story collection First Love, Last Rites, included some candidly sexual stories. One of them, "Solid Geometry", was made into a TV play by the BBC and banned before it could be shown. His first novel, The Cement Garden, dealt with the subject of incest, and more recently Saturday tackled the subject of terrorism and the war in Iraq.

Yet for all this, McEwan himself is a gently-spoken intellectual, from a respectable military family, was educated at that most English of public schools, Eton, and looks not unlike a middle-aged Harry Potter, peering owlishly through his glasses.

McEwan was born in the army town of Aldershot in 1948, and spent much of his childhood traveling overseas with his family, as his father was an officer in the British army. He then went to Eton and the University of Sussex before moving on to the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing program, under the guidance of that other great British novelist, Malcolm Bradbury. Professor Bradbury's course was the first in England to follow the example of American colleges with their Creative Writing programs, and Ian McEwan was the course's first graduate.

It was with short stories written on the course that McEwan started to put together his first story collection, First Love, Last Rites, which came out in 1975. McEwan is a meticulous writer, and it was three years before his second collection appeared, In Between the Sheets, though his first novel, The Cement Garden, came out the same year.

Although Ian McEwan has also written screenplays and children's books, as well as adapting his own work for TV and the cinema, he remains first and foremost a novelist – and many critics say the leading English novelist of his generation. A new McEwan novel is always an event. His 1998 novel, Amsterdam, won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction, now the Man Booker Prize, and his next novel, Atonement, was one if the six novels to make the Man Booker Prize short-list.

McEwan's 2005 novel, Saturday, describes a day in the life of a London neurosurgeon, which is also the Saturday in 2003 when a million people converged on London in a protest against the forthcoming war with Iraq.

Saturday was followed by McEwan's latest novel, On Chesil Beach, which has also been shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. McEwan is by far the best-known name on the shortlist, and the bookmakers have made him the hot favorite to pick up his second Booker Prize, a literary honor which not many novelists achieve. But here again there is controversy, with some of London's literati claiming that On Chesil Beach is a novella not a novel, and too short to be illegible for the prize.

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The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2007 will be announced on 16 October 2007.

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Ian McEwan's Novels and Short Stories

First Love, Last Rites (1975)

In Between the Sheets (1978)

The Cement Garden (1978)

The Comfort of Strangers (1981)

The Child in Time (1987)

The Innocent (1989)

Black Dogs (1992)

Enduring Love (1997)

Amsterdam (1998)

Atonement (2001)

Saturday (2005)

On Chesil Beach (2007)