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William Boyd: Good Man
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William Boyd is the type of writer who wins awards. His first novel, "A Good Man in Africa," won the Whitbread Literary Award for best first novel in 1981. His second novel, "An Ice Cream War," won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His most recent novel, "The Blue Afternoon," won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction.
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A former television critic for the New Statesman magazine (1981-3), William Boyd is ... a scriptwriter who has written twelve scripts for feature film and television productions. His feature films include: Stars and Bars (1988), adapted from his own novel; Mister Johnson (1990); A Good Man in Africa (1994), also adapted from his own novel; Scoop (novel) (1987), adapted from the Evelyn Waugh novel, and Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. He was one of a number of writers who worked on Chaplin, Richard Attenborough's 1993 biopic based partly on the actor's own autobiography. He also wrote and made his debut as a director with the low-budget drama The Trench, set in the first world war just before the Battle of the Somme and first screened in 1999. [4] Man to Man - for which he wrote the script - had its world premiere at the Berlinale in 2005 (the epic tale of an attempt by three Victorian men to prove to the world that they have found evolution's 'missing link').
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A former television critic for the New Statesman, William Boyd is ... a scriptwriter, having written television screenplays for a number of productions including film versions of two of his own books, A Good Man in Africa and Stars and Bars. He also wrote and directed the First World War drama The Trench, while a radio play, the ghost story A Haunting, was first broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in December 2001. He lives in London and was awarded a CBE in 2005.
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William Boyd was born in Ghana in 1952. He was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. He is the author of a number of acclaimed and hugely popular novels and three volumes of short stories, and the recipient of many prizes, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. He is married and lives in London
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As a novelist, William Boyd is well known for his wide-ranging interests, from mathematics to soldiering, and diversity of settings, from East Africa to the Philippines. He is ... prolific, having produced nine novels since his debut in 1981 with "A Good Man in Africa"; three short-story collections; and 13 screenplays, both for film and TV, including several adaptations of his work. He has found both critical and popular success, noted for the depth of his erudition and the sensitivity of his characterizations. And along the way, he has churned out thousands of words of criticism and essays, 30 percent of which, Boyd estimates, are included in "Bamboo."
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Born William Lawrence Boyd in Cambridge, Ohio, he was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He became famous as a Hollywood leading man in silent film romances with a yearly salary of $100,000, but by the end of the 1920s his career had begun to deteriorate, Boyd was without a contract and going broke. Boyd's picture was mistakenly run in a newspaper story about the arrest of another actor with a similar name William Stage Boyd on gambling and liquor charges, which further hurt his career. In 1935 he was offered the lead role in the movie Hopalong Cassidy. He changed the original pulp-fiction character, written by Clarence E. Mulford, from a whisky guzzling wrangler to a cowboy hero who didn't smoke, drink, or swear, and let the bad guy start the fight. Boyd gained lasting fame in the Western film genre beginning in 1935, when he first played Hopalong Cassidy, a role with which he would be indelibly associated.
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Good Man