31 May at 7.05pm
Channel 4 television profile of John Updike with a rare interview by Ian McEwan

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Born in Aldershot in 1948, Ian McEwan was an army child, and moved with his parents to postings in Germany, the Far East and North Africa. He was always aware of not quite fitting in – his father had been commissioned from the ranks and in the stratified world of the army, that meant the family hovered between ranks and officer class. More dislocation followed when Ian was sent to a state boarding school.

He read English at Sussex University, already sure that he was going to write. Hearing that novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson were developing an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, he applied there. The course wasn't ready but they took him on anyway as a guinea pig student. It paid off: at 21 he started writing the unsettling short stories about childhood and sexuality that became his first book: First Love, Last Rites. Published in 1975, it won him a literary prize and a mixture of acclaim and notoriety.

He followed this with more stories, Between The Sheets and, in 1978, published his first novel. The Cement Garden was a story of four orphaned children who bury their mother in the basement and look after themselves, the two eldest having an incestuous love affair. McEwan's interest in deviancy reached its peak with The Comfort of Strangers, a novel of sex and torture in Venice, which some readers complained made them feel tainted, but which the Booker judges liked enough to put on their shortlist. First Love, Last Rites, The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers were all filmed.

McEwan then moved away from writing about the darker reaches of sex, and started exploring other kinds of unsettling situations. In The Child in Time (1987) he explored the shock of grief and the alienating aspects of Thatcherism. In the 1990s he published The Innocent and Black Dogs, which dealt with the Cold War and its after-effects, and Enduring Love, about ballooning, death and stalking. He also found the time to write television plays, screenplays, a children's book and an opera libretto. In 1998 his short, beautifully composed novel, Amsterdam, about two friends and rivals plotting each others' murder, won the Booker Prize.

His most recent novel, Atonement, has wowed many people who previously found his writing too chilly. Opening in a country house in the 1930s, the story combines historical events, intense emotions, subtle shifts of perception and narrative games. There's much excitement about what he'll do next.

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Ian McEwan © PA Photos