William Boyd

William Andrew Murray Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Boyd was born in Accra, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), to Scottish parents from Fife and had two younger sisters. His father, Alexander, a doctor specializing in tropical medicine, and Boyd's mother, who was a teacher, moved to the Gold Coast in 1950 to run the health clinic at the University College of the Gold Coast, Legon (now the University of Ghana). 

In the early 1960s, the family moved to western Nigeria, where Boyd's father held a similar position at the University of Ibadan. Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria and, at the age of nine, went to a preparatory school and then to Gordonstoun school in Scotland and, after that, to the University of Nice in France, followed by the University of Glasgow, where he gained an M.A. (Hons) in English & Philosophy, and finally Jesus College, Oxford. His father died of a rare disease when Boyd was 26.

Between 1980 and 1983, Boyd was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and it was while he was there that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published. He was also a television critic for the New Statesman between 1981 and 1983.

Boyd was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for services to literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been presented with honorary Doctorates in Literature from St. Andrews, Stirling, Glasgow, and Dundee universities and is an honorary fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Boyd is a member of the Chelsea Arts Club.

Boyd met his wife Susan, a former editor and now a screenwriter, while they were both at Glasgow University. He has a house in Chelsea, London, and a farmhouse and vineyard (with its own appellation Château Pecachard) in Bergerac in the Dordogne in southwest France. In August 2014, Boyd was one of 200 public figures who signed a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.

Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Novelists" in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. Boyd's novels include A Good Man in Africa, a study of a disaster-prone British diplomat operating in West Africa, for which he won the Whitbread Book award and Somerset Maugham Award in 1981; An Ice-Cream War, set against the background of the World War I campaigns in colonial East Africa, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982; Brazzaville Beach, published in 1991, which follows a scientist researching chimpanzee behavior in Africa; and Any Human Heart, written in the form of the journals of a fictitious male 20th-century British writer, which won the Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002. 

Restless, the tale of a young woman who discovers that her mother had been recruited as a spy during World War II was published in 2006 and won the Novel of the Year award in the 2006 Costa Book Awards. Boyd's novel Waiting for Sunrise was published in 2012. Following Solo in 2013, Sweet Caress was published in 2015, the fourth novel Boyd has written from a woman's viewpoint. His sixteenth novel, Trio, was published in 2020.