If poetry was the literary form of the First World War, it was fiction that best expressed the reality of the Secondby William Boyd My next-door neighbour for many years, Colonel Peter Peyman, was a veteran of Dunkirk. As a young subaltern he’d fought in the rearguard and had been lucky to be evacuated. After […]
A Schoolmaster’s War: Harry Rée, British Agent in the French Resistance Edited by Jonathan Rée As one drives around the back roads of rural south-west France, where I live for part of the year, it’s quite common to come across a small, well-maintained obelisk on the verge. These modest memorials – usually inscribed with a […]
I AM IN JAPAN, in Tokyo to be precise: looking out of my hotel bedroom window, from the thirty-sixth floor of a huge tower, at this vast modern city stretching out to the horizon and beyond. I’ve been to Tokyo before but, up high, this near-bird’s-eye view is destabilizing and denaturing. Not that there’s much […]
A recent donation to Oxford’s Bodleian Library showcases 100 of the best pictures by British photographers in the 20th and 21st centuries. The writer William Boyd asks how, in an age of selfies, we we are able to judge which images should endure. Back in the summer of 1982, I was living and working in […]
TRIO Brighton. London. Paris. 1968. In the summer of 1968 the world is reeling from the escalating Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, from revolution in France and Germany and the impending invasion of Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile our trio are involved in the making of a rackety Swingin’ Sixties British movie […]
Read the full article on the Stylist website Q: What book do you recommend most to others? Ant: William Boyd, Any Human Heart. It’s a wonderful story of a man’s life; the ups, the downs, the loves, the losses. Dec: The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse by Charlie Mackesy. It’s a beautiful book of philosophy. Get […]
A couple of years ago I came up with the idea of developing my eleven Bethany Mellmoth stories (all included in my short story collection of that name, published in 2017) as a returning TV series. To this end I partnered up with Endor Productions, who had made the mini-series drama of my novel RESTLESS […]
Read the full article on the Daily Mail website • Ant McPartlin has made planning application to extend garage at London home • Changed his name in documents set to Merton Council to Logan Mountstuart • Name is used by fictitious British writer in 2002 novel Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Awarded in early June, the Fitzgerald Prize rewards a novel in French or translated from English reflecting the elegance, the spirit, the flavour and the art of living of the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Award-winning novelist and screenwriter William Boyd talks about his writing process, his film and television experiences from Chaplin to Cork, chimpanzees, what makes his favourite films and what he had for breakfast.