The book set a formal pattern for many of his later novels, including Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993), by interpolating historical segments with present-day narratives. His biography of Henry VIII's friend and chancellor, Thomas More, whose refusal to ratify Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn led to his own execution, was published in 1998.Īckroyd's first novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), is a reworking of Dickens' Little Dorrit. His mammoth and controversial biography of Charles Dickens was published in 1990, while his biography of William Blake, published in 1995, avoided the two traditional views of Blake as either a madman or enlightened visionary. Eliot (1984), winner of the Whitbread Biography Award and the Heinemann Award, when he was prevented from quoting extensively from Eliot's poetry and unpublished correspondence. Similarly, Ackroyd was forced to employ new methods of writing biography in T.
He also displays a genius for literary impersonation, both in his biography and fiction, notably in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), written as Wilde's autobiography and winner of a Somerset Maugham Award. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1984.Įqually acclaimed for both his inventive biographies and his formally diverse fiction, Peter Ackroyd blends past and present, fact and fiction in his writing, much of which revolves around the city of London, evoked as both a powerful physical presence and as a sinister brooding metaphor, haunted and animated by its past and its characters, both real and imaginary.
He is chief book reviewer for The Times newspaper, and a regular broadcaster on radio. On his return from Yale, he worked for The Spectator magazine in London as literary editor (1973-7), then as joint managing editor (1978-82) and film critic.
He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, and studied at Yale University as a Mellon Fellow, where he completed Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism, published in 1976. Novelist, biographer and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London on 5 October 1949.
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