BOYD, William

"I felt sort of an outsider, which became useful to me as a writer."

Born in Ghana in 1952, and living for much of his childhood in West Africa, before finally settling in Britain, William Boyd has said he often thought of  himself as an outsider and this is reflected in many of his novels where he frequently puts his characters in environments that are “strange, threatening, perplexing” so that they “become alien or under under stress” [The White Review].  Whilst working as a lecturer at St Hilda’s, Oxford, he found a publishing house prepared to take on his first novel A Good Man in Africa after having read some of his short stories in which Leafy Morgan also appears.  The book won the 1981 Whitbread First Novel Award and Boyd has gone on to write numerous novels, short stories and plays.

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