A Life in Writing: William Boyd

One of my favorite authors is profiled on The Guardian.

From the piece...

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 ..."

Boyd tells this story with an emphasis on the hard work that lay ahead of him, as well his callowness then. By this stage of his career, though, it has to be said that his early daydreams seem almost laughably modest in comparison to the life he actually leads. Born to Scottish parents in Ghana in 1952, Boyd is a successful writer in the way that earlier generations - Somerset Maugham's, say, or Graham Greene's - popularly imagined such a figure. A saleable and prize-winning novelist, with a large readership in France as well as the English-speaking world, he's also in demand as an art critic, journalist and screenwriter, in which capacity his credits include Chaplin (1992), numerous adaptations of his own and others' novels, and a war movie, The Trench (1999), which he also directed. He knows both Sean Connery and JMG Le Clézio, and divides his time between France and a large townhouse in Chelsea.

You owe it to yourself, by the way, to read one of my favorite novels I've read in the last ten years or so. It's this one.