William Boyd is one of the UK’s most prolific and most highly-acclaimed contemporary novelists. As early as 1983, with only two novels under his belt, Boyd was listed – alongside his contemporaries Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Rose Tremain – as one of Granta’s “most promising British novelists” (https://granta.com/best-young-novelists/), a “promise” he has long since fulfilled. Since the publication of his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, in 1981, he has published, to date, 18 novels; five short-story collections; three plays; 16 screenplays; two radio plays; and two pieces of non-fiction. He has been awarded a wide variety of literary prizes, ranging from the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1981 for A Good Man in Africa, to the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for An Ice-Cream War (1982), the James Tait Memorial...
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Citation: Berberich, Christine. "William Boyd". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 April 2010; last revised 16 July 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=516, accessed 05 December 2025.]
