Brian Boyd
Brian Boyd (b.1952) is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution. He is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
In 1979, after Boyd completed a PhD at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on Nabokov's novel
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
, he took up a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland (appointed as lecturer in English in 1980). Also in 1979, Nabokov’s widow, Véra, invited Boyd to catalog her husband's archives, a task which he completed in 1981.
While Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (1985; rev. 2001), was considered as "an instant classic," Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991) have won numerous awards and been translated into seven languages. In 2009 he published On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, often compared in scope with Northrop Frye's
Anatomy of Criticism
(1957).
“Writing of Pushkin, Nabokov once observed quite accurately that his subject was the threefold formula of human life: the irretrievability of the past, the insatiability of the present, and the unforeseeability of the future.”
“Interviewer:What surprises you in life?Nabokov:...the marvel of consciousness- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.”