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.

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

First Love, Last Rites is Ian McEwan's first collection of short stories and was originally published in 1975.

This collection was Ian McEwan's first published work and comprises a collection of eight short stories, all of which are summarised individually on this page.

All of the stories in First Love, Last Rites are linked with the central themes of sex, death and obsession and all bar one have a supplemental theme of adolescence (or at the very least young adulthood). All the stories are seen from a male perspective.

The stories are all on adult themes and contain references to sexual behaviours and violence which may disturb some readers.

"First Love, Last Rites" won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976.