The Writing of ‘Or Shall We Die?’ | Ian McEwan | Granta Magazine

The Writing of ‘Or Shall We Die?’

Ian McEwan

‘There was too the challenge, as I saw it, of writing a singable English, simple and clear, that could express public themes without pomposity and private feelings without bathos.’

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement, made into a film, received the W.H. Smith Literary Award (2002), the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. His novel Machines Like Me was published by Vintage in 2019 and followed by the novella The Cockroach.

More about the author →