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William Boyd is fascinated by the unpredictable. I've always been an agnostic atheist," he says, "and my experience of living in Nigeria during civil war showed me the randomness at large in the world." He settles into the couch in a light-filled room in his Chelsea home. "If you take my view of everyday life as being governed by chance and happenstance, in a war zone it's even more acute. Being stopped at road blocks with my father by guys coming out of the bush with Kalashnikovs and suddenly having the sense that this could all go hideously wrong ... But then, of course," he points out, with a wry laugh, "you realize that could happen on King's Road in West London, with that courier driving too fast."

Discussing his first book of non-fiction, Bamboo, Boyd doesn't look too worried about either Kalashnikovs or couriers. Indeed, he looks perfectly at ease, like a man who's found his place in the world-and a comfortable one at that.

Since his first novel in 1981, A Good Man in Africa, Boyd has successfully straddled the line between commercial and literary fiction. His eight novels — not including a biography of a fictional artist Nat Tate — are meaty and intense and tend to evoke descriptions like "intoxicating," "enjoyable spectacle," "champion storyteller," "finely wrought" and "serendipitously profound," from reviewers. Whether digging avidly into early aviation and medical hygiene (1993's The Blue Afternoon), primatology and various permutations of mathematics (1990's Brazzaville Beach), or insurance adjusters, ancient helmets and sleep theories (1998's Armadillo), Boyd's novels combine quirkiness and black comedy, along with those other unifying Boydian elements: chance, luck and the effect of chaos on the fragility of life. Elsewhere, he's blurred the line between fact and fiction with a series of fictional creations: an autobiography (1987's The New Confessions), which had a fictional protagonist interacting with real characters; 1998's "biography" of Abstract Expressionist painter Nat Tate, which, after book launches were set up, temporarily fooled prominent members of the art world into believing that the wholly fictional artist really existed, and the journals of a 20th century writer (2002's Any Human Heart, in which Nat Tate cheekily reappears). His characters interact with historical personalities in an attempt, Boyd explains, "to push boundaries of fiction into the world of the real, the documentary, in order to make the fiction more compelling and more powerful. I wasn't trying to colonize nonfiction, I was like a cannibal eating the brain of his enemy, if you like." His first collection of nonfiction includes book and television reviews, art criticism and miscellaneous essays, and ranges from 1978 to 2004, offering a panorama of the work behind the novelist. Taken together, these pieces read like a near-autobiography. Next to his tour of various African homes via the cohabiting insects and boarding-school antics, there are essays on the joys and mystifications of being translated, fighting for royalty payments, his views on the Falklands war, his relationship with Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the frustrations and rewards of screenwriting (he's been writing screenplays nearly as long as he's been publishing novels).

One of three siblings, William Andrew Murray Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana in 1952. His father was a Scottish doctor working abroad, so Boyd grew up in Ghana and Nigeria until being shunted off to boarding school (the kind with two baths for 60 boys) at the age of 9. A post-school year in Nice established a lifelong love of France, where he now lives for "a good chunk of the year." His desire to be a painter, nixed by Dad, led Boyd to literature — "I was temperamentally unsuited for other careers" — and he studied at the University of Glasgow, then, in 1975, at Oxford. It was at Oxford that he flung himself into his chosen career, working at student magazine, Isis where he interviewed the likes of Gore Vidal and Martin Amis.

"I come from a family and a background that has absolutely no contacts with the literary world," he says, leaning forward and resting his chin on his hand, "so I hadn't a clue how to become a writer. At Oxford, I was suddenly aware of writers all over the place — Iris Murdoch and James Fenton and Alan Hollinghurst — being a writer was somehow on the cards." His first published story, in London Magazine in 1978, featured Morgan Leafy, the protagonist of A Good Man in Africa. His second novel, 1982' s An Ice Cream War, was short-listed for the Booker and an instant best-seller in France.

Novels aside, Boyd was now a lecturer at Oxford, writing book reviews for the Sunday Times and taking over the New Statesman's weekly television column from departing Julian Barnes. In 1983 he was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists alongside Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Barnes and Graham Swift. He still admires those contemporaries. "That's over 20 years ago and those young writers are now middle-aged writers but they're still writing away," says Boyd enthusiastically. "I think, in a way, the British novel is still dominated by them, they are still very much around and still very productive." Boyd, by his own admission, attracts an eclectic audience ("I get letters from 16-year-old boys and 80-year-old women"), and is pretty happy writing books that keep readers-and himself-interested. Married to wife Susan for more than 30 years ("we met as students in Glasgow"), he is finishing his new novel — about lies, duplicity and spying — and his 13th screenplay is in production at the BBC. The world may be unpredictable but Boyd's own place in the cultural sphere has long been secure.

• DANEET STEFFENS
• In a world of randomness, author William Boyd reckons he's found his place