The Blue Afternoon

About The Author

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at Gordonstoun School and the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. He is married and lives in London. He was a lecturer in English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford, from 1980 to 1983. Also published in Penguin are A Good Man in Africa, which won the Whitbread Literary Award for the Best First Novel in 1981 and a 1982 Somerset Maugham Award; 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 short listed for the Booker Prize; Stars and Bars (1984); The New Confessions (1987); and 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. 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, have been published together in Penguin as School Ties (1985).