The name’s Boyd, William Boyd

William Boyd is to write the next book in the James Bond franchise. The as yet untitled novel will be published next autumn. To mark the announcement, Daisy Dunn casts her mind back to a recent encounter with Boyd, where he spoke about the art of imagining and writing a thriller.

It’s an ambitious eight minute walk from St. Hilda’s College to the Master’s Garden of Christ Church, where William Boyd is preparing to appear at the Oxford Literary Festival. He’s visibly bracing himself. It’s quite a walk from there to the stage – the kind of walk you’d make at a school prize-giving. A formal path for such an unassuming man. I imagine him making the journey I’ve just done over the bridge from St. Hilda’s, where he was an English lecturer, in 1981. That was the year his first novel, the highly acclaimed A Good Man in Africa was published.

Time has waxed on, but as Boyd finally makes it to the stage he reveals that that chapter of his life is far from over; a new, Africa inspired novel is in the pipeline.