William Boyd

Novelist and screenwriter

William Boyd CBE is a Scottish novelist and screenwriter. Born in Ghana, he was educated at Gordonstoun School, Glasgow University and Jesus College, Oxford. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published while he was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. 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 other novels include An Ice-Cream War (1982), winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Brazzaville Beach (1990), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, and The Blue Afternoon (1993), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction).

He also wrote the screenplays for film versions of two of his own books, A Good Man in Africa and Stars and Bars. He also wrote and directed the First World War drama The Trench, first screened in 1999. His latest novel is Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009).