Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd (born 5 October 1949) is an English novelist, biographer and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. He is noted for his "technically innovative novels", the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.

For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, Ackroyd won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.

Early life and education Ackroyd was born in London and brought up on a council estate in East Acton, in what he has described as a "strict" Roman Catholic household by his mother and grandmother, after his father disappeared from the family home. He was educated at St Benedict's, Ealing, and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon fellow at Yale University.

Work The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and re-examining the works of other London-based writers. He worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 as literary editor and became joint managing editor in 1978, a position he held until 1982.

In his novels he often contrasts historical settings with present-day segments (e.g. The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee). Many of Ackroyd's novels are set in London and deal with the ever-changing, but at the same time stubbornly consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, especially its writers: Oscar Wilde in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), a fake autobiography of Wilde; Nicholas Hawksmoor, Sir Christopher Wren and Sir John Vanbrugh in Hawksmoor (1985); Thomas Chatterton and George Meredith in Chatterton (1987); John Dee in The House of Dr Dee (1993); Dan Leno, Karl Marx, George Gissing and Thomas De Quincey in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994); John Milton in Milton in America (1996); Charles Lamb in The Lambs of London.

Hawksmoor, winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award

In the sequence London: The Biography (2000), Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002), and Thames: Sacred River (2007), Ackroyd has produced works of what he considers historical sociology. These books trace themes in London and English culture from the ancient past to the present, drawing again on his favoured notion of almost spiritual lines of connection rooted in place and stretching across time.

His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Geoffrey Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction. Ackroyd was forced to think of new methods of biography writing in T. S. Eliot when he was told he could not quote extensively from Eliot's poetry and unpublished letters.

From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight, his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series—described as "Not just sound-bite snacks for short attention spans, but unfolding feasts that leave you with a sense of wonder" by The Sunday Times is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.

In a 2012 interview with Matthew Stadlen of the BBC, when asked the question, "Who do you think is the person who has made the biggest impact upon the life of this country ever?", Ackroyd said, "I think William Blake is the most powerful and most significant philosopher or thinker in the course of English history." In the same interview, when asked what fascinates him about London, he said he admired "its power, its majesty, its darkness, its shadows." When asked what he did outside of writing, he said, "I drink, that's about it."

In a 2004 interview, Ackroyd said that he had not been in a relationship since Kuhn's death and was "very happy being celibate." 1984 Heinemann Award (joint winner) for T. S. Eliot 1984 Somerset Maugham Award for The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde 1984 Whitbread Biography Award for T. S. Eliot 1985 Guardian Fiction Prize for Hawksmoor 1985 Whitbread Novel Award for Hawksmoor 1988 Booker Prize for Fiction – nomination (shortlist) for Chatterton 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) for The Life of Thomas More 2001 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature for London: The Biography 2003 British Book Awards Illustrated Book of the Year (Illustrated London shortlisted) 2003 Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) 2006 Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2006 Honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from Brunel University.