ONE of Britain's most distinguished writers, award-winning author Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot in 1948.

His father was an officer in the army so Ian spent much of his childhood in the Far East, Germany and North Africa.

After returning to Britain he graduated from Sussex University and was the first student on the MA Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia.

He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 1976 his first collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites won the Somerset Maugham Award. A second volume of stories, In Between the Sheets, appeared in 1978 and his first novel, The Cement Garden was published in 1978.

Probably his best known work is Atonement, shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the WH Smith Literary Award.

The story is being developed as a film starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Brenda Blethyn and Vanessa Redgrave - dealing with the Allied retreat from Dunkirk.

He has won the Booker prize, The Somerset Maugham Award for a first book and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction for The Child in Time.

As well as his prose fiction, Ian McEwan has written plays for television and film screenplays, including The Ploughman's Lunch, an adaptation of Timothy Mo's novel Sour Sweet and an adaptation of his own novel, The Innocent.

Film adaptations of his own novels include First Love, Last Rites (1997), The Cement Garden (1993) and The Comfort of Strangers (1991), for which Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay.

Name: Ian McEwan Occupation: Writer DATE OF BIRTH: June 21, 1948 Local Link: Born in Hampshire