English author Ian McEwan to be awarded the 2011 Jerusalem Prize During the 25th International Book Fair in Jerusalem

The Jerusalem Prize, Israel's highest literary honor for foreign writers will be awarded this year to the English author Ian McEwan in a ceremony that will take place on February 20th, the opening evening of the Jerusalem International Book Fair.

The 25th International Book Fair will take place in Jerusalem from February 20th-25th, 2011 at the ICC Jerusalem International Convention Center. The International Book Fair in Jerusalem has been held biennially since 1963 and is considered one of the leading book fairs in the world.

The Jerusalem Prize is awarded biennially to a writer whose work best expresses and promotes the idea of ''freedom of the individual in society.'' The theme was chosen both for its wider international appeal and for its internal Israeli resonance. The modest monetary value of the Prize, currently US $10,000, reflects that it was never intended to be anything more than a symbolic sum.

Previous winners include: Bertrand Russell (first winner, 1963), Simone de Beauvoir (1975), Milan Kundera (1985), Mario Vargas Llosa (1995), Susan Sontag (2001), Arthur Miller (2003), Haruki Murakami (2009) and others.

Many of the authors who were awarded the Jerusalem Prize later received Nobel Prize for Literature. Among them include: Bertrand Russell , Octavio Paz, V. S. Naipaul, Mario Vargas Llosa and J. M. Coetzee.

Chairman of the Jerusalem Prize Jury for 2011 is Professor Menahem Ben-Sasson - President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

About Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. 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. In 2010 he was honored to receive the Tulsa Library Trust's 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.

McEwan lives in London. His most recent novel is Solar.

http://www.jerusalem.muni.il/jer_sys/publish/showPublishEng.asp?pub_id=38643&father_id=29768&lang=2