Major Works
- A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself (novel) March, 2019
- The Lonely Witness: A Novel, 2018
- Tout est Brise: A Novel (Everything Is Broken) 2017 (translator Simon Baril)
- Death Don’t Have No Mercy (short stories), 2015
- Gravesend: A Novel (2013), to be reissued in September, 2018
Biography of William Boyle
William Boyle, photo by Katie Farrell Boyle. Photo courtesy of William Boyle
Author William M. Boyle lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife Katie Farrell Boyle and their son and daughter. He went to college at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he got his BA degree. He has been an adjunct instructor in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi in Oxford since 2012 and has also worked at The End of All Music (Oxford’s great record store) since 2013. Before moving to Oxford, Boyle lived in Brooklyn and the Bronx in New York, the Hudson Valley, and Austin, Texas.
Boyle was born in 1978 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He lived with his mother’s family in the working-class neighborhoods of Gravesend and Bensonhurst which were largely of Italian-American descent. His mother’s family was Italian. His father’s side of the family was Scottish. In an interview he stated that his father was absent for much of his childhood.
Mississippi writers Tom Franklin, William Boyle, and Ace Atkins meet in Oxford, Mississippi. Photo courtesy of Ace Atkins
Boyle’s first novel, Gravesend, was originally developed as his master’s thesis for the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in 2011. It has been translated into French, German, and Greek.
Gravesend was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and is shortlisted for the New Blood Dagger Award in the UK. It is being reissued in the United States in 2018.
A book of his short stories entitled Death Don’t Have No Mercy was published in 2015. A novel Tout est Brise or Everything is Broken was published in French in 2017.
His most recently-published novel is The Lonely Witness (2018) and another novel A Friend Is a
The Lonely Witness by William Boyle
Gift You Give Yourself will be published in March of 2019.
In addition to writing novels and short stories, Boyle has contributed work for several magazines and newspapers including the Clarion Ledger and the Oxford American. He has also served on panels at the Mississippi Book Festival since 2015.
Interview
Read interviews of William Boyle at the following websites
- Interviewed by Dawn Ius for The Big Thrill
- Interviewed by Stephen Usery for WYPL’s Book Talk
- “Part of the Joy Is In the Mystery”: Interviewed for Vol. 1 Brooklynby Tobias Carroll
- Interviewed about The Lonely Witness by Scott Montgomery for MysteryPeople
- Interviewed on A Stab in the Dark podcast by Paul Hirons
- On The JDO Show
- Interviewed for MysteryPeople blog by Scott Montgomery
- Interviewed for Stuff & Nonsense newsletter by Alex Segura
- Book Talk podcast with Stephen Usery
- Interviewed for Pittsburgh Tribune-Review by Rege Behe
- “Doom Rules the Mood”: An Interview with Author William Boyle by Robert Rea
William Boyle, Photo by Katie Farrell Boyle. Used by permission.
- Q& A with William Boyle by Irene McGarrity
- Dancing with Myself, Sea Minor (Nigel Bird’s blog)
- Broken Land: An Interview with William Boyle by Anya Groner, Los Angeles Review of Books
- “It Belongs to the Neighborhood”: An Interview with William Boyle by Alex Shakespeare, Fiction Writers Review
- Kind of Dancing: An Interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, Fiction Writers Review
- Letting Go: An Interview with Richard Lange, Fiction Writers Review
- The Whisper in the Ear: An Interview with Megan Abbott, Fiction Writers Review
Related Websites
- William Boyle’s author website
- Review by Ellis Purdie of Death Don’t Have No Mercy in Clarion Ledger, Aug. 8, 2015
- Read a brief description and reviews of neo-noir novel Gravesend on Amazon.
- Boyle’s short story collection is described on Amazon
- Read a brief review of Gravesend on NoExit Press website
- Read an interesting review of Death Don’t Have No Mercy on Dead End Follies.
- Interview: Q and A with William Boyle, Author of Gravesend on Merging Identities website.
- Interesting interview with Boyle by Alex Shakespeare in 2013 in Fiction Writers Review.