William Boyd: A good man in Chelsea

His easy-going persona is at odds with his prolific work rate. What drives the Costa prize novelist?

Like the narrative arc of a well-structured novel, William Boyd's Costa (formerly Whitbread) Novel Award for his book, Restless, arrives precisely at the right moment - 25 years after he won the Whitbread for best debut novel with A Good Man in Africa. He could not have timed it better if he had written the scenario himself.

Boyd is a peculiar kind of novelist. Affable, charming, youthful and generally good company, he possesses few of the attributes normally associated with major literary figures. Clearly, he prefers the company of actors and performers over fellow writers and can count David Bowie and Colin Firth among friends who admire his work and enjoy his easy, discreet company. "I've always found him incredibly self-effacing for someone so talented," says Firth. "Of his generation I think he's the one most likely to be remembered." Unlike many of his contemporaries - Amis, Barnes, McEwan - he wields his intellectual power lightly, both in prose and in life. As far as it is possible to determine, he is comfortable, happy and satisfied with his lot. In person, he has the air of an engaging and popular supply teacher in a private school.

Yet this character sketch is probably as misleading and illusory as his mischievous biography of the neglected American painter whose "life" Boyd chronicled in Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960. The book fooled several US academics into believing Tate had existed when in fact - like Woody Allen's faux biopic of an American jazz guitarist in Sweet and Lowdown - he was a product of the author's imagination.

While Boyd may not appear to be fuelled by demons or self-doubt or poverty or any of the usual accelerants of the writer, he is nonetheless driven to spin yarns in fiction and in screenplays on a massive scale: nine novels, 13 screenplays, two collections of short stories, journalism, reviews and other bits and bobs.

As he works on several projects simultaneously, his restless industry and all-pervasive commitment to the written word suggests something more than the easy-going bright bloke who graces the media from time to time without ever troubling the gossip columns. Moreover, in a climate of evolving literary tastes and publishers eager to find and promote the latest wunderkind, Boyd has maintained a steady readership, no matter what critical conditions prevail at the time.

He has won no major prizes since his debut (though, to be sure, he has notched up a few littluns along the way). He has invariably received polite notices from the critics without ever being championed in the same way as his highfalutin contemporaries. And he has not, so far, been subject to a fatwa.

Of all his contemporaries, he is the hardest to classify. He is a comic writer, but not exclusively so; he is a satirist, but not on a grand scale; he is a historical novelist but only up to a point; he is a British writer but he has strong roots in Africa. He is the perpetual outsider who has been welcomed inside but still views the assembled company with a kind of quizzical and amused detachment.

William Andrew Murray Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana, on 7 March, 1952. Both his parents were Scots who had moved to Africa after the Second World War. His father was a doctor who specialised in tropical diseases and his mother was a teacher. He attended schools in Ghana and Nigeria where his father worked in universities. He has described his childhood as "idyllic" and it is easy to see why.

"We had a big house, and we had a cook, a houseboy and a gardener," he once revealed. "As a boy I used to go to the beach a lot. For my parents I think it got harder and harder, but my memories are of an amazing time in an amazing place."

The world outside rarely impinged, though there was an incident that he has never forgotten. One night, when he was a child in civil-war-torn Nigeria, he was in a car driven by his father. Boyd senior tried to drive through a roadblock manned by aggressive, drunk soldiers. Boyd Jr often recalls the fear and excitement as the militiamen pointed their rifles in the windows.

"I remember thinking 'this could all go horribly wrong'. My father dealt with the situation very well and they let us go, but for a moment I got a glimpse of how thin the ice was. In any war zone you get that feeling of life's inherent unpredictability and fragility. It's something I've been aware of from very early on."

At the age of nine, Boyd was packed off to Gordonstoun School in Scotland, returning to Africa in the holidays. Thence to Glasgow University where he began the "obligatory terrible autobiographical novel" before going on to Jesus College, Oxford where he penned short stories in between essays and had some of them published in magazines like Punch.

He wrote three novels before A Good Man in Africa, none of which was published. With bitter irony, his father died from a tropical illness while Boyd was in his twenties before being able to witness his son's success.

"My debut novel was actually my fourth novel," he revealed. "I often say to young writers who have written a novel and can't get it published, 'well, write another one'."

A Good Man was published while he was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and won not only the Whitbread first novel award but also the Somerset Maugham Award. Among his other professional attributes, he was the New Statesman's television critic between 1981 and 1983. Since then he has produced nine novels, many of which have been best-sellers, including Stars and Bars and Brazzaville Beach. His current award-winner, Restless, is the story of Ruth Gilmartin who discovers that her very English mother is a Russian émigré and former spy. He has adapted Stars and Bars and A Good Man in Africa for the screen, contributed to the screenplay for Chaplin, and wrote the First World War movie The Trench, starring Daniel Craig. In 2005 he was awarded the CBE for services to literature.

Boyd has embraced the life of a professional novelist with much personal success. He writes in longhand in minute handwriting in various venues - the London Library, his home in Chelsea - and also in his house in the Dordogne where he has a vineyard that produces wine good enough to supply a few of the more upmarket restaurants in Chelsea.

Today, he writes mainly in the afternoons ("between lunchtime and cocktail hour") and divides his time between novels and screenplays. Yet he still confesses to a vague sense of "rootlessness". He assuages his lack of family - he and his wife Susan, a magazine editor whom he met at Glasgow University, have no children - by occasionally entering the temporary "family" of a movie. It is his background and rootlessness that also allows him to explore other cultures - Africa especially - and at different periods of history.

"I do enjoy writing," he has said more than once. "I know some writers enjoy the invention but find writing an endless night of the soul. I don't. I think, if you can earn your living writing fiction, it's very agreeable."