MIDDLEBURY, Vt. ― Author Ian McEwan, the English novelist of worldwide critical acclaim, will read from his work in Mead Chapel at Middlebury College on Tuesday, Sept. 7, at 7:30 p.m. The recipient of numerous awards, McEwan won the prestigious Booker Prize for “Amsterdam” in 1998, and many of his novels, including “Atonement,” “Enduring Love,” “The Cement Garden,” and “The Comfort of Strangers,” have been made into major films. “Solar,” his newest book, was published in March of this year. Mead Chapel is located on Hepburn Road off College Street (Route 125). The reading is free and open to the public.

According to the Washington Post, “No one writing in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan.” A Los Angeles Times review of “Solar” said, “McEwan is a writer of ideas who is gratifyingly committed to the old-fashioned pleasures of plot and suspense.”

“McEwan is widely admired around the globe as a writer of substance,” said Jay Parini, author and Middlebury College D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing. “We feel extremely fortunate that we will open the new academic year with a reading by one of the world’s greatest living writers.”

McEwan’s many prizes for his work include the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories “First Love, Last Rites;” the Whitbread Novel Award in 1987 and the Prix Fémina Etranger in 1993 for “The Child in Time;” and Germany’s Shakespeare Prize in 1999. His novel “Atonement” received the WH Smith Literary Award in 2002, National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award in 2003, Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction in 2003, and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel in 2004. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel “Saturday,” and his novel “On Chesil Beach” was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader’s Digest Author of the Year.

McEwan lives in London.

For more information, contact Anna Harlan, academic coordinator in the Department of English and American Literatures, at aharlan@middlebury.edu or 802-443-5276.