Researching Michael Wood

Wood's wife's deep-rooted interest in Africa, after spending her early life in Belgian Congo, led to the move of the family to East Africa. They arrived at the port of Mombasa in 1946. With the help of Gerald Anderson, Wood established himself as a general surgeon in East Africa. Soon he found he was regularly being called to emergencies beyond the confines of the city of Nairobi. Often he had to charter flights to remote locations where no hospitals existed. The number of these emergencies escalated and became a challenge. Mindful of what lay ahead, Wood learnt to fly.

In 1954, Wood went to England on a Marks Plastic Surgery Fellowship with Archibald McIndoe. Together with Thomas Rees, an American surgeon (also a beneficiary of the Marks Plastic Surgery Fellowship), they would develop the idea of the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) and its Flying Doctors Service. The needs for fundraising for AMREF were very demanding from the word go, which Wood undertook tirelessly. This involved him taking breaks from his work in Africa to solicit funds in Europe and North America. He personally recruited Leonore Semler of Germany who in turn raised millions of euros on behalf of the organization over 50 years. Wood's fundraising trips brought him into contact with famous people: the Aga Khan IV, Vice-President Richard Nixon, as well as David Rockefeller.

According to Sister Breege Breslin, one of the Medical Missionaries of Mary who worked with Wood on many occasions as his theatre nurse, said that it was his faith and his determination to help ease a situation that made him the ‘Legend’ he became. Sister Breege said during an interview that even after long hours of surgery, with very little daylight left for him to fly back to base, Wood would always take the time to see one last patient.

Wood was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1972 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the bush country of Southern Kenya.

In 1970, he was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for services to Africa and in the 1985 New Years Honours List he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1986, he was given the Raoul Wallenberg Award for Humanity.

Wood retired from being Director General of AMREF in 1983 and soon afterward went on to establish Farm Africa (Food and Agricultural Research Mission). On 16 May 1987 Wood died of cancer at his home in Nairobi, Kenya.

He was director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton from 1995 to 2001, and chaired Princeton's English department from 1998 to 2004. He writes in literary publications such as The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, where he is also an editorial board member and writes a column, "At the Movies." Wood also teaches at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont during the summers.

Prior to teaching at Princeton, he taught at Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, lived briefly in Mexico City, then took the chair of English at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.

In addition to countless reviews, he also has written books on Nabokov, the trans-historical appeal of the oracle from the Greeks to the cinema, on the relations between contemporary fiction and storytelling, and on figures in the modern cultural pantheon including Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka, Stendhal, Gabriel García Márquez and W. B. Yeats. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society.

Wood gave evidence to the Iraq Inquiry in November 2009 and in January 2010, in which he stated that he advised Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, that the invasion of Iraq was illegal without a second United Nations resolution.

Wood was Principal Legal Advisor at International Court of Justice advisory opinion on Kosovo's declaration of independence.