A Night with Ian McEwan: Highlights from the Northcliffe Lecture 2026 | Student Piece

The 2026 Northcliffe Lecture, part of the UCL200 programme celebrating UCL’s bicentenary, brought one of Britain’s most significant contemporary novelists into conversation with one of UCL English’s most familiar literary voices.

Ian McEwan joined Professor John Mullan, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, for a discussion that moved between his latest novel, What We Can Know, and key moments from across his career. Introduced by Dr Lara Choksey, the event opened with a framing of the major concerns that have shaped McEwan’s fiction for decades, while also setting up the themes of the new work.

McEwan was thoughtful, dryly funny, and often disarmingly direct. At several moments, the room seemed to settle into a kind of collective stillness, especially when he spoke about sorrow and the impossibility of resolution. There was one particular thread which wove itself smoothly through each shift in the conversation: a rejection of tidy endings. “There is no resolution,” McEwan said, speaking of fiction and life itself as well as perhaps his own writing style. His novels overflow with life and death, yet one may reach the final page and still find no true end to the testing, thrilling trail that is the narrative.

The very idea of closure was light-heartedly criticised by McEwan, who called it “this terrible word we borrowed from the Americans.” The line drew laughter, but McEwan expanded on this saying that suffering is universal, and its effects are never neatly healed, narratively tied off, or smoothly sealed within the self. Instead, “that death, or that illness… [become] part of the ritual of being you.” This is one of McEwan’s central literary concerns: that people are formed as much by what they cannot repair as by what they can control.

Atonement is a clear example of this. McEwan voiced his resistance at any reading of the novel that would imagine confession or apology as enough to redeem the harm done by Briony. He remarked: “She doesn’t absolve herself, she doesn’t even blame herself,” before adding, “this is how we all live a life.” 

Mullan returned to the stories that first established McEwan’s reputation: strange, dark, often grotesque pieces that shocked early readers and earned him the nickname “Ian Macabre”, namely First Love, Last Rites. When asked whether writing those stories had felt like a kind of possession, McEwan replied, “Yeah, it had a strong element of that.” Yet he also insisted that at the time, he “didn’t think [he] was doing anything shocking at all.”

That contradiction opened into one of the most revealing parts of the evening. McEwan reflected on his childhood and on the conditions from which his early imagination emerged. He described his upbringing as taking place in “a very unsensual family” and at “a very unsensual time.” He spoke of the emotional restraint of the 1950s, of a world in which conversation between adults and children was limited almost to the point of absence. Literature of writers such as James Joyce and others destroyed such restrictions of self-expression and he discovered that “everything could be said.” In this light, McEwan’s writing appeared not simply sensational, but engaged with the possibilities that literature had opened up.

Mullan pointed to memorable scenes from Enduring Love, The Child in Time, Saturday, and Atonement, and McEwan made clear that his interest lay less in spectacle than in the moral pressure such moments generated. They are “the great revealer of character.” The balloon scene in Enduring Love — in which a group of strangers try to hold down a hot-air balloon before it lifts a child away — became for McEwan “a very good running metaphor for morality.” If everyone holds on, disaster may be avoided; once one person lets go, the whole moral balance shifts. As he put it, “It’s quite easy to be good in a society where most people are good,” but under pressure, “very ordinary people do the most atrocious things.”

McEwan’s commitment to detail was also a point of intrigue which he explained arose from the need to make readers see. He quoted Joseph Conrad’s famous formulation — “[the task] is, before all, to make you see” — and clearly marked it as an artistic principle incorporated in his own writing. He also recalled Vladimir Nabokov’s instruction to students to “forget the moonshine of generalisation” and instead “fondle the details.” For McEwan, detail is what makes fiction psychologically convincing, while gradually narrowing the possibilities of the outcome.

McEwan’s generosity of spirit and of thought was one of the defining qualities of the evening. If one theme lingered after the evening ended, it was the idea that literature does not solve sorrow so much as give shape to the ways we carry it. As he articulated in Atonement, “a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.”

This piece was written by UCL English Literature student Lamar Mansour. 

Photo credit Ondre Roach: https://www.ondreroachphotography.com/