William Boyd (writer)

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William Boyd (2009)

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

life and work

The son of Scottish parents spent his early childhood in Ghana and attended Gordonstoun private school in Moray / Scotland from the age of 9 to 17 . He regularly spent the summer holidays in Africa, including in Nigeria during the Biafra War , which made a lasting impression on him, as he emphasized years later in an interview. He then studied French in Nice , philosophy and English at the University of Glasgow and Jesus College in Oxford , where he received his doctorate with a thesis on Shelley .

From 1980 to 1983 he worked as a lecturer in contemporary literature at St. Hilda College, Oxford . During this time he published his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), for which he was voted one of the 20 best young British storytellers in 1983 by Granta Magazine and the Book Marketing Council. Since then, Boyd has written many novels, short stories and screenplays for film and television, some of the earlier about the life of British diplomats in Africa or schooling at a boarding school , the later mainly about the question of identity in modern society.

In 2005 Boyd was named Commander of the British Empire (CBE).

In September 2013, Boyd's official James Bond novel Solo was published by Jonathan Cape, the publisher of Bond inventor Ian Fleming .

He lives with his wife Susan, an editor of Harper's Bazaar magazine , alternately in London and in Bergerac , where Boyd also grows wine.

Works

Novels and short stories

Plays

  • 2013 Longing (adaptation of the short stories With Friends and My Life by Anton Chekhov - Premiere February 28, 2013, Hampstead Theater, London; Director: Nina Raine)
    • A new summer , German by Patricia Klobusiczky, Verlag Felix Bloch Erben

Scripts

  • 1983 Good and Bad at Games , Movie made for TV, England (Director: Jack Gold)
  • 1985 Dutch Girls , Movie made for TV, England (Director: Giles Foster, with Colin Firth )
  • 1988 Stars and Bars , USA, based on his novel (Director: Pat O´Connor, with Daniel Day-Lewis )
  • 1990 Mister Johnson , USA 1990 (Director: Bruce Beresford, with Pierce Brosnan )
  • 1990 Julia and her lovers
  • 1994 A Good Man in Africa
  • 1987 Scoop , Movie made for TV, England, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh (Director: Gavin Millar, with Denholm Elliott and Donald Pleasence )
  • 1992 Chaplin
  • 1999 The Trench , France / England, a film about the First World War Battle of the Somme ; Boyd also directed (with Daniel Craig )
  • 2002 Armadillo , three-part television series, England / USA, based on his novel (director: Howard Davies , with Stephen Rea and James Frain)
  • 2005 A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets , Movie made for TV, England (Director: John McKay , with Rupert Graves )
  • 2010 Any Human Heart , four-part television series, England, based on his novel (Director: Michael Samuels - German Any Human Heart )
  • 2012 Restless , two-part television series, England, based on his novel (Director: Edward Hall, with Hayley Atwell and Charlotte Rampling - Ger. Ruhelos )

Essays

  • 2005 Bamboo
    • Flying home , German by Matthias Fienbork, Cologne: 5Plus 2012 (contains four of 131 essays)
    • Bamboo. Essays , German by Matthias Fienbork, Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2014. ISBN 978-3-8270-1215-9 (contains 27 of 131 essays including the four from Fly Home )

Directorial work

  • 1999 The Trench , film, France / England

Awards and honors

  • 1981 Whitbread First Novel Award for A Good Man in Africa
  • 1982 Somerset Maugham Award for A Good Man in Africa
  • 1982 Mail on Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for An Ice-Cream War
  • 1983 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
  • 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Brazzaville Beach
  • 1991 McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year for Brazzaville Beach
  • 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Blue Afternoon
  • 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) for The Blue Afternoon
  • 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Any Human Heart
  • 2005 Commander of the British Empire
  • 2006 Costa Book Award (formerly Whitbread Award) in the 'Roman' category for Restless

Film adaptations

The Nat Tate hoax

In 1998 Boyd published the "Biography" Nat Tate. An American Artist: 1928–1960 , which contains paintings and the tragic life story of the supposedly forgotten New York expressionist Nat Tate, who however never existed. Together with his paintings he was an invention of Boyd. When the book was published, the privy David Bowie gave a party where he read excerpts from the book. A number of celebrities said they knew Tate. The revelation caused a scandal.

The name Nat Tate is derived from the names of two of Britain's leading art museums: the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery .

The Nat Tate story is not an isolated incident in Boyd's work. He created a veritable " trilogy of forgeries":

  • In 1988 the fictional autobiography of the film director John James Todd, whose career began in the silent film era , appeared with the novel "The New Confessions" .
  • Nat Tate followed in 1998.
  • Finally, Boyd invented the diary of the fictional writer Logan Gonzago Mountstuart (1906-1991), which creates links with Nat Tate in addition to encounters with Pablo Picasso and Virginia Woolf . Boyd evaluated it literarily in 2002 in "One man's heart".

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Toronto Globe and Mail , Ben King interview, Profile of William Boyd, 2002 archive link ( April 7, 2008 memento in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ London Gazette  (Supplement). No. 57665, HMSO, London, June 11, 2005, p. 7 ( PDF , accessed October 1, 2013, English).
  3. ↑ Everyone loves Logan In: The World . February 5, 2005 (accessed online May 29, 2010)
personal data
SURNAME Boyd, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British novelist and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Accra , Ghana