Profile - William Boyd

Boyd lives in a handsome terraced house in Chelsea, West London – one of the most expensive districts in an insanely expensive city. "I couldn't possibly afford to buy a house here now," he jokes, explaining that he moved in years ago when the area was less exclusive and bought the house as a derelict shell.

Inside, the house is far less ostentatious than the exclusive address would make you think. Every wall is lined with bookshelves, it seems, and every flat surface piled with more books. And if there were any more doubt, Boyd's long, shaggy, writerly hair and donnish demeanor make it clear that he's not your average owner of a multi-million dollar house.

Londoners always begin their conversations by talking about real estate, it's the city's collective neurosis. But Boyd stands out from a generation of London-based writers as his roots lie far from here, in West Africa.

It's not until well over half way through that the hero of his latest book, Any Human Heart, arrives in Nigeria, where Boyd spent a large part of his childhood. But many of his books are set in West Africa, or have West African settings with other names.

Says Boyd: "It was a great place to grow up, you know. And a huge influence on me - in ways I don't really want to analyze. It just made me different than if I had been born in Taunton or Edinburgh. It is just a different sort of background."

It also gives him something different to write about, other than the tedious bed-hopping of middle class Londoners that fills so much contemporary British fiction.

Says Boyd: "I have this theory, which is unprovable but unfalsifiable, that the period up until you become self-conscious as a writer is in a way your true raw material. Because once you start saying to yourself 'I am a writer' you see the world through a different lens.

"So if I want to verify an emotion you go back to that pre-self conscious state – 'Ah, that is what it was like to feel really ashamed or really bitter.'"

" I started thinking of myself as a writer when I was in my early twenties. So all my sort of unselfconscious years were largely African."

The African connection links Boyd with an earlier generation of British writers who had directly experienced Africa – Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are among the most commonly named as his influences, and their names feature prominently on the spines of those packed shelves.

The other connection to that generation of writers is Boyd's time in Britain's boarding schools. Like most British children who grew up in colonial or post-colonial Africa, Boyd was sent to boarding school in Britain from a young age, shuttling back to Africa for the holidays.

He says: "That is the other great experience of my pre-self-conscious life, nine years in a single sex boarding school. I have written two films that deal with it, and if anyone wants to know what it was like they can look at those two films.

"It was an almost anthropological exercise - I wanted to fix the experience which it seems to me has been incredibly romanticized in fiction and films and television."

"Very little has been written about those schools that rings remotely true. Like Harry Potter, being a classic example. Utter nonsense, in terms of being entirely unrealistic."

Despite this rich heritage of English fiction, it's a rather more obscure French writer who was actually the starting point for Any Human Heart – a French writer called Valéry Larbaud, and in particular his book A O Barnabooth: His Intimate Journal.

Larbaud is mainly remembered today, if at all, for translating James Joyce's Ulysses into French, but he published numerous poems and books in the name of the imaginary character Barnabooth, including his Intimate Journal – a diary of an imaginary man of letters who swanned around the world writing poetry.

Says Boyd: "I suddenly thought, 'this is a fantastically interesting form'. I keep forgetting to cite Larbaud as an influence because nobody has ever heard of him."

The clue is in the subtitle of Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart. It refers directly back to the genre of the Intimate Journal, as practiced by Larbaud and other members of his group of writers, the Cosmopolites.

Members of this circle, real and imaginary, crop up in the book. Logan even writes a book about them. "Good reviews, no sales," says Boyd with a wistful chuckle.

Any Human Heart is packed with fleeting encounters with literary and artistic figures, most of whom were real, and some he has invented in considerable detail. It's difficult not to be charmed by the delight Boyd takes in mixing these made up figures into a thoroughly researched historical past.

"In this kind of book you have to set your facts absolutely right before you can set your imagination running. So at the party where Logan falls out with Virginia Woolf - If you look at her diaries she actually was at the Cafe Royal that night, but forgot to note that Logan Mountstuart was there."

If parts of the book seem reminiscent of some of those other writers on Boyd's shelf, or indeed the plot, then so much the better. Boyd's not shy of naming his influences – that Evelyn Waugh "lurks behind" the diaries from the hero's schoolboy period, or that Cyril Connolly "lurks behind" the diaries from his London days.

Whatever the ingredients, the result is a highly enjoyable read. Those familiar with Connolly or Waugh may enjoy spotting the references, but there's plenty for readers who don't know them.

The details of life in literary London are constantly shadowed by the threat of war, a recurring theme in Boyd's work. It's never far from the surface of Any Human Heart, from schoolboy exercises in the twenties to bad memories of the French resistance in the eighties.

Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970. It had a profound effect on him. "It was crazy, idiotic, and not at all like I imagined war to be. All my received opinions from books and television turned out to be misguided."

Boyd wrote a novel about it, one of three unpublished books written before his first published novel. "I have cannibalized bits of it since – for The Ice-cream War, which transplanted it to East Africa and the First World War. Then in Brazzaville Beach, and this latest novel, which will probably be the last one."

Boyd's war experience has also fed into film and television projects, including the recent feature film The Trench. It was Boyd's debut as a director, though he has many writing credits to his name.

Says Boyd: "It is a great thing to do alongside writing novels, which is a solitary business. I like having colleagues, and collaborating."

He has numerous film and projects in the pipeline, including a four series on the early life of Adolf Hitler for BBC television, and a feature film about a botched kidnap. He's also working on making a film of his novels The Blue Afternoon and Brazzaville Beach.

The latter book is about an anthropologist studying chimpanzees in Africa who gets caught up in two wars - a human civil war and a war among the chimps she is studying. Filming realistic chimps would make it a particularly difficult project, but Boyd is optimistic.

"With animatronics and computer graphics, the potential to recreate those chimp wars is fantastic. It would be a really interesting film to make." About 8 years ago, Pedro Almodóvar was interested in filming it, says Boyd, but those discussions came to nothing. But he's still working on it.

His other ideas for future writing projects include a book on the Falklands War, and perhaps a short story told through the notebook of an imaginary character.

Boyd explains: "I have a notebook, which I carry around with me and write quick ideas down. The random stuff that you stick in a notebook has in it the ghost of a kind of narrative. So you could write a narrative that is almost the antithesis of narrative - Something completely random and spontaneous, but somehow the reader would make the connection, find the story in the random jottings."

"It sounds good but it might be quite hard to pull off in a way that will seem right." he adds.

Combine all that with the promotional work for Any Human Heart and you have an extremely busy schedule. Boyd is an energetic man – the vigour and drive of the language and the plotting in his latest book suggest that more than his manner.

But his fans will hope that Boyd's film and TV projects don't keep them waiting too long for the next novel.