Restless

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana and was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at Gordonstoun School and at the Universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. Between 1980 and 1983 he was a lecturer in English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford. He is the author of A Good Man in Africa, which won the Whitbread Literary Award for the Best First Novel in 1981 and a Somerset Maugham Award in 1982; On the Yankee Station (1982), a collection of short stories; An Ice-Cream War, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for 1982 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Stars and Bars (1984); The New Confessions (1987); Brazzaville Beach, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1990 and for which William Boyd was awarded the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year; The Blue Afternoon, which won the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; The Destiny of Nathalie X, a further collection of short stories, and Any Human Heart. Eight of his screenplays have been filmed, the most recent of which is A Good Man in Africa, based on his first novel. Two television films about public school life, Good and Bad at Games and Dutch Girls, appear together in School Ties (1985). William Boyd is married and lives in London.