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).