William Andrew Murray Boyd CBE FRSL (born 7 March 1952) is a British[2][3] novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.

Boyd was born in Accra, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana),[4] to Scottish parents, both from Fife, and has two younger sisters.

[5] In August 2014, Boyd was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.

Boyd's novels include: A Good Man in Africa, a study of a disaster-prone British diplomat operating in West Africa, for which he won the Whitbread Book award and Somerset Maugham Award in 1981; An Ice-Cream War, set against the background of the World War I campaigns in colonial East Africa, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982; Brazzaville Beach, published in 1991, which follows a scientist researching chimpanzee behaviour in Africa; and Any Human Heart, written in the form of the journals of a fictitious male 20th-century British writer, which won the Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002.

[12] Several collections of short stories by Boyd have been published, including On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth (2017).

Directed by Nina Raine and performed at London's Hampstead Theatre, the play starred Jonathan Bailey, Tamsin Greig, Natasha Little, Eve Ponsonby, John Sessions and Catrin Stewart.

[16][17] Boyd, who was theatre critic for the University of Glasgow in the 1970s and has many actor friends, refers to his ambition to write a play as finally getting "this monkey off my back".

Protobiography, an autobiographical work by Boyd that recalls his early childhood, was published initially in 1998 by Bridgewater Press in a limited edition.

When the book was initially published, it was not revealed that it was a work of fiction, and some were duped by the hoax; it was launched at a lavish party, with excerpts read by David Bowie and Gore Vidal (both of whom were in on the joke), and a number of prominent members of the art world claimed to remember the artist.