Ian McEwan, the British novelist, will receive this year’s Kenyon Review Award for Literary Review Achievement. The trustees of this magazine will honor Mr. McEwan at the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York on November 9, 2006. This strikes me as another wise and well-deserved tribute, following awards in earlier years to E. L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Seamus Heaney, Umberto Eco, and Roger Angell. All of these authors have shared not merely the highest literary aspirations and achievement, but courage and commitment and service to the literary community.
I have long been an admirer of Ian McEwan’s fiction. In recent years he has achieved a broader popular acclaim with such novels as Atonement and Saturday. Yet his earlier works, Amsterdam, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, are stunning for the fierce, clean temper of their prose, their intellectual ambition—while avoiding pretense and posturing—and their fascination with the searing disruptions caused when the extraordinary or the unforeseeable penetrate everyday comforts and assumptions.
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