256- English Literature
Peter Ackroyd
Facts
Born London • England
Awards
And Honors Costa Book Awards (1985) •
Prix Goncourt (1985) • Costa Book Awards (1984)
Notable
Works “Chatterton” • “English Music” •
“First Light” • “Hawksmoor” • “Mr. Cadmus” • “The Fall of Troy” • “The Great
Fire of London” • “The House of Doctor Dee” • “The Last Testament of Oscar
Wilde” • “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders” •
“Three Brothers”
Peter
Ackroyd
British
author, biographer, critic and scholar
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.
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