That year he took up a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland (on New Zealand novelist Maurice Gee) before being appointed a lecturer in English there in 1980.

[1][2] Boyd's 1999 book, Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, attracted attention both for the novelty of Boyd's reading of Pale Fire and for his rejecting his own influential interpretation of the notoriously elusive novel in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years.

Once[3] compared in scope with Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957), On the Origin of Stories proposes that art and storytelling are adaptations and derive from play.

It also shows evolutionary literary criticism in practice in studies of Homer's Odyssey and Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!.

[4] As of 2019[update] Boyd continues to work on Nabokov, including ongoing annotations to Ada (since 1993), collected in a website (AdaOnline, since 2004), an edition of Nabokov's verse translations (Verses and Versions, 2008), of his letters to his wife (Letters to Véra, 2014), of his uncollected essays, reviews, and interviews (Think, Write, Speak, 2019) and of his unpublished lectures on Russian literature, and also especially on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Art Spiegelman, and Popper.