Peter Ackroyd

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Peter Ackroyd (born October 5, 1949, London) is an English author.

Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm and his father had left home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers at the age of 5 and wrote a play about Guy Fawkes when he was 9. He also first realised he was gay at the age of 7.^[1]

Ackroyd won a double first in English at Clare College, Cambridge as an undergraduate and was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University, in the United States.

His career started in poetry, including works such as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, including shortlisting for the Booker Prize in 1987.

Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. He was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984 and is currently a regular radio broadcaster and book critic.

Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London and one of his most recent works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. In 2002 he followed this with his most scholarly work yet, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, being a work of intellectual history that traces themes in English culture from the Anglo-Saxon era to the present.

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

1 Works
2 Television / documentary
3 External links
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Works

[edit] Fiction

The Great Fire of London – 1982
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde – 1983
Hawksmoor – 1985
Chatterton – 1987 (shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 1987)
First Light – 1989
English Music – 1992
The House of Doctor Dee – 1993
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem – 1994 (also published as The Trial of Elizabeth Cree)
Milton in America – 1996
The Plato Papers – 1999
The Clerkenwell Tales – 2003
The Lambs of London – 2004
The Fall of Troy – 2006