William Boyd(1952–)

William Andrew Murray Boyd was born at Accra on the Gold Coast on 7 March 1952, only son of a Scottish doctor running the new University Hospital there and a Scottish teacher. The Gold Coast became Ghana when he was four; the Boyd childhood ran across the Accra and Ibadan medical compounds through the post-independence African 1950s and 1960s.

He was sent at nine to Gordonstoun on the Moray Firth, a displacement-and-school-life experience that runs across most of his fiction. He read English and philosophy at the University of Glasgow, took a first, and went up to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 for a doctorate in English literature under Christopher Ricks, taking a junior lectureship at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1980.

The first novel came out of the Oxford lectureship. A Good Man in Africa (1981), the fictional account of a junior Foreign Office officer's misadventures in a thinly disguised post-colonial West African state, won a Whitbread First Novel Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. The second, An Ice-Cream War (1982), the First-World-War East-African novel, was Booker-shortlisted, and he resigned the lectureship in 1983 to write full-time, as he has done for the forty-three years since.

Seventeen novels followed. The major Boyd novels of the post-1990 period, Brazzaville Beach (1990), The Blue Afternoon (1993), Any Human Heart (2002), Restless (2006) and others, run in the biographical-novel register that became the Boyd house style: the long retrospective narrative of a life set across one of the major twentieth-century historical backgrounds, in the manner of the post-Forster realist tradition. Any Human Heart, the journal-form novel covering the seventy-year life of the fictional writer Logan Mountstuart, is the most discussed of the post-1990 work; the 2010 Channel 4 adaptation took it to the Sunday-evening television audience.

He has also written substantial screenplay work, the James Bond novel Solo (2013) for the Ian Fleming Estate, the essay book Bamboo (2005), and the celebrated Nat Tate art-history hoax of 1998. He was appointed CBE in 2005, has been married to Susan Wilson for fifty-one years, and divides his life between west London and the Dordogne. The Boyd name, the Ayrshire-and-Galloway surname from Gaelic Buidhe, the yellow-haired one, he carried from the Accra and Ibadan childhood into the long post-imperial twentieth-century-life novel.