Ian McEwan: “My writing life has been one long uphill struggle to persuade the world that I didn’t do a creative writing course”

“I had a plain kitchen table,” says Ian McEwan. “A sort of small, pine, deal kitchen table. I laid out some pencils and pens, and a block of blank sheets. It was about seven o’clock in the evening, and I promised myself I would not leave this room, and I would not go to sleep, until I had written a short story.” At five the following morning, “a rather grisly tale” called “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” lay finished in front of him. In ten hours, spread evenly across the junction of his second and third days at the University of East Anglia, McEwan had written the first story ever to emerge from a British creative writing course.

That was the autumn of 1970. Today, McEwan is