Scottish novelist and screenwriter William Boyd discusses his accomplished literary career with t5m.
Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award for his novel A Good Man in Africa, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, for An Ice Cream War, William has had an incredibly successful career in both fiction and film.
William Boyd was born in 1952 on The Gold Coast, in Accra, Ghana. His father was a doctor who worked in the local University Health services and his mother worked as a French teacher.
William enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Ghana, but later moved north along the coast to Nigeria, where his life became suddenly less ideal. He moved into an area riddled with conflict.
In the time that he and his family moved to Ghana, the country had seen two military coups and one very bloody civil war, the Biafran War. He recalls coming into a land of roadblocks, being held at gunpoint, and being body-searched everywhere he went.
Growing up in this turbulent and unfamiliar territory was a major influence on his life and writing. William credits these experiences as having a profound affect on his idea of fiction writing to this day.
