A Good Man in Africa

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Boyd has also published the short story collections On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Natalie ‘X’ (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dream Lover (2008), and a collection of non-fiction, Bamboo (2005). If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Much of Boyd’s writing utilises the awkward intersection of private and public life, and the suffering of individuals who – like the unfortunate protagonist of his screenplay Good and Bad at Games (1983) – cannot match the cultural demands of their environment. In this respect, he is also intrigued by the way in which individuals register the intimate details of their lives, something which developed into his use of a diary or journal form in several novels. In Armadillo (1998), a low-level thriller set in a London insurance company, the central character’s journal is his means of containing and interpreting the nature of coincidence, chance, unpredictability and risk in everyday life. And a diary of sorts provides the basis for Boyd’s 1987 epic, The New Confessions, in which film-maker John James Todd’s overriding obsession with Rousseau’s Confessions becomes the basis for his own confessional memoir of a life lived, through war, romance and ambition, in tandem with the twentieth century.

Boyd is referring principally to the death of his father, Alexander, which took place when the writer was in his early 20s. "When you experience bereavement at a youngish age," he says, "you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board." Alexander disapproved of his son's choice of career, and when he died "there was no sense in which I was proving him wrong". Worse, "my wife's mother died at almost the same time of a horrible, lingering cancer. It was a bad year, we lost as it were half our family in a month, and that's the sort of thing that shakes you up. People experience these tragedies all the time, there's nothing special about it, you're not a Job figure. But in the context of an individual life these events take on a certain significance." He wasn't a precocious reader at that stage in his life. At Gordonstoun he wanted to be a painter, but knew his father would see art school as beyond the pale. English literature, however, was just about acceptable, and by the time he left Glasgow University, the writerly ambitions he'd conceived in Nice were "very firmly set". Seeing academia as a way to pay the rent (his father could also "see that it was vaguely a career, with a pension"), he ended up in Oxford, "teaching English as a foreign language, trying to write a thesis, teaching at St Hilda's and writing a TV column for the New Statesman - I don't know how I managed to keep all those balls in the air". His models were "people like Greene, Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway. Kingsley Amis was another presence in my reading in those days. I was never drawn to magic realism or fantasy or surrealism or postmodern experimentation. I read a lot of Beryl Bainbridge, but the realist novel was what really appealed to me."A Good Man in Africa is William Boyd's first novel, published in 1981. It won both the Whitbread Book Award for a first novel and the Somerset Maugham Award that year. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

British Council complies with data protection law in the UK and laws in other countries that meet internationally accepted standards. In 2012 Boyd was commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to write an official James Bond novel, which was published in 2013 on the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Fleming’s Casino Royale. Fleming himself made a cameo appearance in Any Human Heart. General word for an atmospheric disturbance such as a blizzard, hurricane, gale of force 10 on the Beaufort scale or cloudburst with thunder and lightning A former television critic for the New Statesman (1981-3), William Boyd has also worked extensively as a screenwriter for both film and television. He wrote the television screenplays Good and Bad at Games (1983) and Dutch Girls (1985) (collected in book form as School Ties in 1985), and has adapted two novels by Evelyn Waugh for television: Scoop (1987) and Sword of Honour (2001). He wrote and directed the First World War film The Trench (1999) and has also adapted his own novels Stars and Bars (1988) and A Good Man in Africa (1994) for film, and Armadillo (2001), Any Human Heart (2010) and Restless (2012) for television. Boyd’s recent success in refreshing the conventions of spy fiction should serve him well in his forthcoming project of writing the next official James Bond novel, published in 2013.

Things in Morgan's personal life only get more complicated, too. Hazel gives him gonorrhea. He is still sleeping with Celia. And he's in love with Priscilla, to whom the sniveling Richard is now engaged. Boyd’s eighth novel Any Human Heart (2002), a history of the twentieth century told through the fictional journals of the novelist Logan Mountstuart, won the Prix Jean Monnet for European Literature in 2003 and was nominated for the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Restless (2006) won the 2006 Costa Novel Award. His most recent novels are Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009) and Waiting for Sunrise (2012). Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Known as the poet of the piano, composer of ballades, études, nocturnes, preludes, scherzos and sonatas as well as two concertos When William Boyd decided that he wanted to be a writer, at the age of 19 or so, he had, he says, a fairly shadowy notion of what a writer's life might be like. The ambition descended on him in Nice, where he studied for a year between school and university and "started writing these little vignettes and mini-stories. I started to fantasise, in the way you do at that age, about my future life, and I wanted to be a novelist. But I didn't know anybody who had anything remotely to do with the world of literature, didn't know any writers or publishers or agents. The fantasy of being, as Chekhov said, a free artist was coloured by novels I'd read or movies I'd seen. That was where I got my information from. So it was a sort of parodic version: get up from the typewriter, stretch, mix yourself a drink, step out on to your balcony and look at the sea. That was the life for me ..."

The story opens in Morgan's office at the British High Commission. His employee, the Second Secretary of the Commission, Richard Dalmire, informs Morgan of his upcoming marriage to Priscilla Fanshawe, daughter of their boss, the High Commissioner Arthur Fanshawe. Though he puts on a brave face, this news devastates Morgan. He once pursued Priscilla but did not commit fully to the relationship, sending her into Richard's all-too-eager arms.For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.People's attitudes to life's uncertainties are also, he thinks, a matter of temperament. As the way he discusses his bad year indicates, his own isn't self-pitying. It's easy to imagine his early life - a colonial upbringing with decolonisation in full swing, followed by boarding schools in Scotland - producing a somewhat alienated figure, but Boyd doesn't present himself as a sensitive intellectual bruised by his post-imperial personal history. His parents, who came from Fife's professional middle classes, moved to west Africa in the postwar years in part because his father had served there in the war, specialising in tropical medicine, and in part because "life was good there for a young married couple - big house, big job, servants, golf courses. And sunny." Both Ghana and Nigeria, where the family moved later, were, he says, "totally integrated societies. There was no settler class and no racial tension. It wasn't like Kenya and certainly not South Africa. But it was a privileged colonial upbringing."