Edward Christopher Sheeran, the English singer, songwriter and guitarist known to the world as Ed Sheeran, was born on 17 February 1991 in Halifax, West Yorkshire. He is 35 as of 2026, stands about 1.73 metres and weighs around 75 kilograms. His parents, John and Imogen, come from London; John later lectured while Imogen designed jewellery, and together they ran the art consultancy Sheeran Lock. His brother Matthew is a composer. Irish grandparents sit on one side of the family, and his father grew up in a large Catholic household.
The family later settled in Framlingham, Suffolk. Sheeran sang in church and at school from the age of four, learned guitar while at Rishworth School, and found his voice as a writer at Thomas Mills High School. He took artist development at Access to Music, studied at the Academy of Contemporary Music, and as a teenager joined the National Youth Theatre.
He married his childhood friend Cherry Seaborn in 2018. The couple have two children. In 2022 they faced a hard stretch when Cherry was found to have a tumour during pregnancy, and close friend Jamal Edwards died suddenly. Those losses shaped the album Subtract.
After moving to London in 2008 he played rooms across the city, opened for Nizlopi, then toured with Just Jack and worked with Leddra Chapman. A run of EPs led to his first studio album, +, in 2011. It topped charts in Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland and on the US Folk Albums list. x followed in 2014 and ÷ in 2017, both hitting number one in more than fifteen territories. Shape of You and Thinking Out Loud became defining singles of the decade.
Honours include two Grammy Awards for Thinking Out Loud, for Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance, along with Brits, Ivor Novellos, MTV Europe Music Awards and a long list of others.He has also collected American Music Awards, Echo Awards, BMI London Awards and further nods across video and pop categories, with later Grammy attention for Shape of You and the ÷ album.
Estimates of his fortune sit around £370 million, or roughly 400 to 480 million US dollars, built on records, publishing, touring and the rest of a career that still reads as one of the most commercially successful of this century.
