Tough guy writer

An upcoming New Yorker profile will reveal new facts about one of the English-speaking world’s pre-eminent novelists. Ian McEwan, as it turns out, was one of the first to hide his friend Salman Rushdie—in his own Cotswold cottage—in the days immediately after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa threatened Rushdie’s life 20 years ago. The article also explains that three friends read every one of McEwan’s novels before publication, a sometimes risky act of friendship. When poet Craig Raine described McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers as “complete crap—put it in a drawer and forget it," the novelist refused to speak to him for almost two years.

The Guardian