william boyd
William Boyd is a British novelist, screenwriter, and film director who writes in English.
Boyd was born on 7 March 1952 in Accra. His education took him across several institutions, including Gordonstoun, the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, the University of Glasgow, and Jesus College. That internationally spread schooling gave him a formation that crossed borders well before his career did.
Among his notable works is A Good Man in Africa. Over the course of his career Boyd has received a substantial number of prizes and honours: the Costa Book Award for First Novel, the Somerset Maugham Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Best of Young British Novelists recognition. His standing in French literary culture has been acknowledged through the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle, the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises, and the Officer of Arts and Letters. In the United Kingdom, he holds the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has received the Bodley Medal.
The range of recognition Boyd has accumulated — spanning British and French institutions, covering fiction prizes and cultural honours alike — runs as a consistent thread through his public profile. His roles as novelist, screenwriter, and film director reflect a career that has moved across more than one medium, and A Good Man in Africa stands as the work most directly identified with his name in the literary record.
Quotes by william boyd
It was like picking a scab off a sore; he actually wanted scar tissue – it would be quite wrong to try and forget, to blank it all out. Every fraught memory that lurked here had played its role: everything he was today was an indirect result of the life he had led then. It confirmed the rightness of every step he had taken.
I know part of my sorrow is just disguised self-pity, I needed that exchange and I worry how I’ll cope without it and whether I can replace it – if only it were as easy as buying a new dog.
Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it did not possess.
Isn’t this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs – the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth.
She was happy. Her father had always told her to make sure and recognise that state when it arrived, and acknowledge it. ‘It’s like money in the bank, old girl’, he would say...
In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap – the literary world and the world of rock music.
As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It’s at these moments that we know we are going to die.