Any Human Heart, which chronicles the life and times of Logan Mounstuart as he travels between Oxford and Uruguay, is one of the many series that have been commissioned by Channel 4, as they inject a staggering £20million into new drama series.

William Boyd has adapted his own novel, and will work with Lynn Horsford and Lee Morris who will produce the four-part series for Carnival Films, with Sally Woodward Gentle as executive producer. Filming is due to begin this winter.

We can’t wait!

William tells t5m about his exciting childhood, which saw him leaving Africa to go to boarding school in Scotland, and moved between the two worlds for the next nine years, a process he calls a ‘double life’.

In an exclusive and personal interview with t5m, William tells us about his fascinating childhood and the implications this had on his conception of his own identity, as well as describing to his the painstaking detail of his writing process.

William Boyd on t5m is essential viewing for anyone fascinated, intrigued or inspired by the power of English literature.

William Boyd talks to t5m about the power of the novel as a tool for in-depth critique of society. While an autobiography may recount facts and events in a person’s life, only a novel can truly account for how that person is feeling, what it is they are thinking.

‘The power of a novel resides in it’s ability to explain ourselves to each other far better than anything else.’

William has written bestselling novels including A Good Man In Africa, An Ice Cream War, and Restless.

Restless pulls you deep into the obscure, forgotten intricacies of wartime espionage, in particular the covert operations run by the British in America before Pearl Harbor. William was intrigued by Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories and drew elements from his sly spy to add into Eva.

Eva works for a unit attached to British Security Co-ordination, which ran one of the biggest-ever British covert operations from room 3603 in the Rockefeller Centre. While she ultimately triumphs, the moral of the story is once a spy, always a spy.

While William went into the project wanting to write a novel about a spy, he retrospectively sees it more as a story of identity, and discovering who someone really is. ‘We’re not the same person, we’re a progression of selves.’

He says that the way to do it is to forget absolutely everything to do with sexuality and gender differences. Ignore all you know between man and woman and focus entirely on personality. All decisions in the story have to be made by the character and not by the writer.

William writes from the view of a woman in Brazzaville Beach (1990), in which he portrays the character Hope Clearwater, and again in The Blue Afternoon (1993) and Restless (2006).

Rather than a memoir or autobiography, the book is written as a series of personal journal entries, because as a journal, the reader doesn’t know what will happen next, whereas in a memoir, the reader already knows the history behind the times.

The challenge in writing a journal that is not your own, and after the fact rather than through the duration of this character’s life, is that you have to completely get into the character’s mind, as though to write completely from someone else’s point of view.

William, as a young writer embarking on his literary career, was aiming for publication. More than magazines and journals, he was ready to have his works viewed under his own name.

He sent a collection of nine short stories that had been published in various magazines, to two separate publishers. Never hearing back from one, the other was quite interested in publishing a novel prior to the short stories.

Here, William discusses the frantic three-month rush of writing A Good Man in Africa, a momentous literary accomplishment.

It was then that William moved to Nice in the south of France to pursue a diploma in French Studies. He tells t5m of his time there, living as a poor student and writer through the postal strike, and using this time to reinvent himself.

All at the same time, he was writing short stories, his first and still unpublished novels, a thesis, and was working as a journalist for magazines, interviewing such great writers as Gore Vidal and Martin Amis. He admits that there was no ‘game plan’ in his work, that it just seemed like what a young writer was to do.

He reflects on his literary mentor, Alan Ross, owner of London Magazine. Alan was responsible for nurturing the career of many young writers, such as Graham Swift and Paul Theroux.

London Magazine was William’s first big step, and he recalls seeing the beginnings of his literary career developing from here.

Coming from a long line of successful professionals, doctors and lawyers, William’s father was hesitant of his son’s choice, but William went on to test the waters.

He discusses his first encounters with literature. ‘Your first engagement with literature is empathetic.’

He cites  the short stories and lesser-known works of F. Scott Fitzgerald as his favourite works, and recalls his first empathetic encounter with the fictional character Basil Lee.