Three decades after it won the Whitbread prize, Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time has become a TV film. It will be screened this weekend in the coveted Sunday 9pm drama slot on BBC1, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing a children’s writer whose daughter vanishes on a shopping trip.

This transmission launches an unofficial festival of McEwan adaptations: Dominic Cooke’s On Chesil Beach (in which I play a minor role) will be shown at the London film festival next month before a general release next year, soon followed by Richard Eyre’s movie of The Children Act.

The rush of productions reflects the fact that McEwan has consistently used genre templates. He has adopted for more discursive or subversive purposes the conventions of the spy thriller (The Innocent, Sweet Tooth), the crime novel (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, Enduring Love, Saturday, Amsterdam), romance (Atonement, On Chesil Beach) and, in The Children Act, the sort of domestic ethical dilemma that is the signature of more obviously populist novelists such as Joanna Trollope and Jodi Picoult.

McEwan has also been more prolific as a writer of screenplays than any other Booker prize winner apart from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who, in addition to taking the literary prize in 1975 for Heat and Dust, won two Oscars for her work with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.

As a young writer of scandalous short stories, McEwan was rapidly talent-scouted by TV drama departments. Jack Flea’s Birthday Celebration, an oedipal comedy about a young man’s relationships, was shown on BBC2 in April 1976. He then wrote a BBC1 Play for Today, The Imitation Game (1980), directed by Richard Eyre; this script about a woman involved in the second world war code-breaking at Bletchley Park was at least the equal of the unrelated 2014 movie of the same name in which Cumberbatch played Alan Turing. Eyre and McEwan then made The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983) for Channel 4, with Jonathan Pryce memorable as a cynically ambitious journalist in the Thatcher era.

However, despite this busy visual CV, the enthusiastic advance word about The Child in Time, On Chesil Beach and The Children Act – following preview or festival screenings – represents a recovery of the screen’s confidence in McEwan and his in it. Until this accidental trilogy of films, the writer’s relationship with TV and cinema has been mixed, even by the unhappy standards of collisions between literature and film. Earlier in his career, McEwan suffered the two worst results a screenwriter can endure: banning and studio interference.

The writer’s own adaptation of his short story “Solid Geometry” was cancelled by the BBC mid-production in 1979, with a corporation press release citing “grotesque and bizarre sexual elements” in a play that included the prop of a severed penis preserved in a glass jar. (The story was eventually filmed by Channel 4 in 2002.)

McEwan’s original script for The Good Son, a film about a child who seems to have the potential for evil, went though the hands of multiple directors and other writers before becoming a 1993 vehicle for then child star Macaulay Culkin. McEwan publicly dissociated himself from the film, although his name is on the credits.

McEwan also suffered the more regular disappointment for a novelist of books not quite translating cinematically. Despite classy adapters and directors – Harold Pinter scripting Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Joe Penhall writing Roger Michell’s Enduring Love (2004) – his books never seemed as suited to cinema in execution as they had appeared before shooting.

The Innocent (1993) was far from the best work of its star, Anthony Hopkins, or its director, John Schlesinger, possibly because the studio tried nervously to market as a romance a movie in which the key scene involves the protagonist and his lover cutting up the body of her husband and packing it into suitcases. The closest to movie gold was Joe Wright’s Atonement (2008), which was nominated for seven Oscars, winning one for its score.

Now, though, McEwan seems to have become the most screen-friendly novelist of his generation. Writers with a high screen strike rate are sometimes accused by critics of starting to write books that are screenplay-ready. McEwan’s most recent novel, though, might win an anti-Oscar for its resistance to filming: Nutshell is narrated by a foetus. If that story is to extend his current screen festival, perhaps only a visual maverick such as Charlie Kaufman (Anomalisa) or Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) could manage it.

• The Child in Time is on BBC1 on 24 September.