Ed Sheeran

Ed Sheeran is an English singer-songwriter whose run of acoustic-led pop albums and stadium-scale singles has made him one of the world’s best-selling music artists, with 200 million records sold worldwide. Born Edward Christopher Sheeran in Halifax, West Yorkshire, on 17 February 1991, he was raised in Framlingham, Suffolk. He began writing songs at around eleven, building a style that joins singer-songwriter intimacy with pop, folk, soft rock and dance-pop elements.

In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the EP No.5 Collaborations Project before signing with Asylum Records later that year. His debut album, +, arrived on 9 September 2011, topped the UK Albums Chart, and introduced “The A Team” as his first hit single. In 2012, he won Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. His 2014 follow-up, ×, topped charts internationally and was named the second-best-selling album worldwide of 2015. It won Album of the Year at the 2015 Brit Awards, while Sheeran received the Ivor Novello Award for Songwriter of the Year. “Thinking Out Loud” later won the Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance in 2016.

÷, released in March 2017, became the best-selling album worldwide that year. Its opening singles, “Shape of You” and “Castle on the Hill”, debuted in the top two in several countries, making Sheeran the first artist with two songs entering the US top 10 in the same week. By March, ten tracks from ÷ had reached the UK top 10, a record for a single album. “Perfect” topped the charts in the US, Australia and the UK, where it was the 2017 Christmas number one. Sheeran was named Global Recording Artist of the Year for 2017, and in December 2019 the Official Charts Company named him its artist of the decade for combined UK album and singles-chart success during the 2010s.

His collaborative album No.6 Collaborations Project debuted at number one in most major markets in 2019 and produced the UK number ones “I Don’t Care”, “Beautiful People” and “Take Me Back to London”. The albums = and − followed in 2021 and 2023, with = topping charts in most major markets. He released Autumn Variations through his Gingerbread Man Records label in September 2023, followed by Play in September 2025. His tours rank among the most-attended concert tours, and the ÷ Tour became the highest-grossing tour of all time in August 2019. An alumnus of London’s National Youth Theatre, he also appeared as himself in the 2019 film Yesterday.