William Boyd

William Boyd (1952- ), novelist and scriptwriter. Born on March 7, 1952, in Accra, Ghana, to Scottish parents, Boyd was educated at Gordonstoun School and the universities of Nice, Glasgow, and Oxford. From 1980 to 1983 he lectured in English at Oxford University and was the television critic of the New Statesman. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), told the story of Morgan Leafy, a British diplomat in West Africa who resorts to sex and alcohol to counteract a humdrum existence—with disastrous and comic results. The book was an immediate success, winning the 1981 Whitbread Prize and the 1982 Somerset Maugham Award, and allowed Boyd to concentrate on writing full time. Morgan Leafy reappeared in his next novel, On the Yankee Station (1981), a collection of short stories.

William Boyd’s next novel, An Ice Cream War (1982), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and marked a return to the setting of Africa, being the tale of an insignificant campaign in East Africa during World War I. Stars and Bars (1984) was less successful; a comedy about an English art expert in America that seemed, many critics thought, to have been too consciously written for the cinema, it was, in fact made into a film in 1987. That year, however, saw the publication of The New Confessions, a brilliant rehabilitation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau through the eyes of John James Todd, a Scottish filmmaker who runs into trouble, and brief glory, in post-war Berlin and the Hollywood of the McCarthy era. The book marked Boyd as one of the most important writers of his generation. Then, in 1990 and 1993, came two novels with female narrators, Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon. He subsequently published the short-story collections The Destiny of Nathalie X and Other Stories (1995), Fascination (2004), and The Dream Lover (2008), as well as various nonfiction pieces in Bamboo (2005). Among his later novels are Armadillo (1998), a psychological mystery about an insurance loss adjuster, Any Human Heart (2002), an ambitious fictional memoir of a writer's life spanning the 20th century, with cameo roles by such figures as Virginia Woolf and Pablo Picasso, and the thriller Restless (2006), set during World War II, winner of the Costa Novel Award. Boyd is also known for authoring screenplays of his own work and adaptations of the work of other writers, including Joyce Cary and Mario Vargas Llosa. He was made a CBE in 2005.