William Boyd (writer)

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William Boyd, CBE (born 7 March, 1952 in Accra, Ghana) is a contemporary Scottish novelist and screenwriter.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Work 2.1 Novels 2.2 Screenplays 3 Hoax 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Of Scottish descent, Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria, in Africa. He was educated at Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland; and then the University of Nice, France, the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and finally Jesus College, University of Oxford, England.

Between 1980 and 1983 he 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 awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2005. He currently lives in London.

Work

Novels

Boyd, who is of the same generation as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, has been, some people believe, "overlooked" as a novelist, largely because he has kept a low public profile. Although his novels have been short-listed for major prizes, he has never had quite the same publicity as his contemporaries. 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.

His novels include Brazzaville Beach (1991), about a female scientist researching chimpanzee behaviour in Africa; A Good Man in Africa, for which he won the Whitbread Book award and Somerset Maugham Award in 1981, and An Ice Cream War, for which he was nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982. The book won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the same year. Any Human Heart was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2002. His most recent novel Restless was published October 3, 2006, and won the Novel Award in the 2006 Costa Book Awards.

Screenplays

As a screenwriter Boyd has written a number of feature film and television productions. The feature films include: Stars and Bars (1988), adapted from his own novel; Mister Johnson (1990); A Good Man in Africa (1994), also adapted from his own novel; Scoop (1987), adapted from the Evelyn Waugh novel, and The Trench (1999) which he also directed. He was one of a number of writers who worked on Chaplin (1992). His television screenwriting credits include: Armadillo (2001), adapted from his own novel, Dutch Girls (1985) and Good and Bad at Games (1983), about English public school life.

Hoax

In 1998, Boyd published Nat Tate: American Artist, 1928-1960, which presents the paintings and tragic biography of a supposed New York-based 1950s Abstract Expressionist painter named Nat Tate, who actually never existed and was, along with his paintings, a creation of Boyd's. When the book was initially published, it was not revealed that it was a work of fiction, and some were duped by the hoax; it was launched at a lavish party, with excerpts read by David Bowie (who was in on the joke), and a number of prominent members of the art world claimed to remember the artist. It caused quite a stir once the truth was revealed.^[1]

The name Nat Tate is derived from the names of the two leading British art galleries: The National Gallery and The Tate Gallery.

Nat Tate also appears in Any Human Heart, also by Boyd, with a wry footnote to the 1998 book.

References

1. ^ "Bowie and Boyd "hoax" art world", BBC, 1998-04-07. Retrieved on March 10, 2007.

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