Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd (born October 5, 1949, London, England) is a British novelist, critic, biographer, and scholar whose technically innovative novels present an unconventional view of history.

Ackroyd graduated from Clare College, Cambridge (M.A., 1971), and then attended Yale University for two years. In 1973 he returned to England and worked as an editor for The Spectator. In 1986 he became the principal book reviewer for The Times (of London).

Ackroyd published several books, including two collections of absurdist poetry, a study of transvestism, and a biography, Ezra Pound and His World (1980; revised as Ezra Pound, 1987), before turning to fiction. His first novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), was followed by The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Hawksmoor (1985; winner of the Prix Goncourt and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Chatterton (1987), First Light (1989), English Music (1992), The House of Doctor Dee (1993), The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders (1995), The Fall of Troy (2006), Three Brothers (2013), and Mr. Cadmus (2020). In 2009 Ackroyd also published a retelling of The Canterbury Tales.

Ackroyd’s later biographies included T.S. Eliot (1984), Dickens (1990), Blake (1995), The Life of Thomas More (1998), Charlie Chaplin (2014), and Alfred Hitchcock (2015). In the 21st century Ackroyd turned to historical surveys. For his Voyages Through Time series, he penned works on ancient Egypt (2004) and ancient Greece (2005). He also wrote a multivolume collection on the history of England, the first book of which was published in 2011. His other nonfiction work included London: The Biography (2000), Thames: Sacred River (2007), London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets (2011), and Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (2017). The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time (2010) is a collection of ghost sightings in England.

In his book Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (1976), Ackroyd attacked contemporary English literature and the literary establishment and dismissed conventional realistic fiction as no longer useful. His own novels reflected this position, integrating historical and modern settings to deliberately disrupt the conventions of historical fiction.