Brian Boyd
New Zealander · b. 1952
Brian Boyd is a New Zealand literary scholar and evolutionary critic, best known for his two-volume biography of Vladimir Nabokov and for On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009). In the latter he argues that art and storytelling evolved as a form of cognitive play — a way of sharpening social intelligence — making fiction central rather than peripheral to human nature. He holds a research chair at the University of Auckland.