Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan has said his literary life has been “a way of being” rather than a career as he was made a Companion of Honour.
The author, 74, is behind a host of novels, short stories, screenplays and children’s books – with a number being adapted into films including Atonement, which starred Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
McEwan said he was “delighted” to be recognised in the King’s birthday honours for services to Literature.
In a statement to the PA news agency, he said: “News of the honour, in a letter from the Cabinet office, was a complete surprise and, naturally, I was delighted.
“I guess it amounts to a really good review.
“I’m now entering my 54th year of writing fiction. As all dedicated writers know, a literary life is not a career so much as a way of being.
“The task in hand, the novel one is trying to create, is always there, a constant and intimate companion.
“The writers who precede me in this award have long been companions too – Maugham, Greene, Larkin, Pinter, Margaret Atwood, Antonia Fraser, and my friend Salman Rushdie. Truly, a companionable honour.”
Born in 1948 in Aldershot, McEwan travelled widely as a child as his father was an army officer before returning to study English at the University of Sussex.
His first published fiction was a collection of macabre short stories – First Love, Last Rites – which won the Somerset Maugham Award.
He followed that success with another critically acclaimed collection, In Between The Sheets and his first novel The Cement Garden.
McEwan has been nominated for the Booker Prize six times to date, winning the prize in 1998 for Amsterdam, which follows a fragile friendship descending into hatred and revenge.
He published Atonement in 2001 and it later was adapted for the big screen, winning the Bafta for best film and an Oscar for best original score.
His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, was also turned into a film starring Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton with Bill Nighy.
His latest novel, Lessons, was published in 2022 and it spans seven decades, from the end of the Second World War to the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, while also taking in the Suez and Cuban Missile Crises and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is told from the perspective of McEwan’s protagonist Roland Baines, who “rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it”.
The novel follows on from Machines Like Me, which explored an alternative history populated by androids, and Brexit satire The Cockroach, both published in 2019.
The Companion of Honour is a special award granted to those who have made a major contribution to the arts, science, medicine, or government lasting over a long period of time.
The members, of which there are 65 at any one time, currently include actress Dame Maggie Smith, Lord Coe, Professor Stephen Hawking, Sir John Major and Desmond Tutu.
