Peter Ackroyd was born in London, England and educated at Clare College,
Cambridge; and at Yale. He began his literary career as a poet, before turning
to fiction. Today, he is the bestselling author of at least fourteen
novels (often writing with a dual narrative style where the two voices are
separated by the centuries), fifteen non-fiction books, various collections and
history series for children.
His best known books include Hawksmoor (winner of the Whitbread Award)
and Chatterton (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) His most recent books
include The Lambs of London; Shakespeare: The Biography; and
J.M.W. Turner, and Newton, the second and third biographies in the Ackroyd Brief Lives series. He
has also written full-scale biographies of Dickens, Blake, Poe, and Thomas More and
the novels The Clerkenwell Tales, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree,
Milton in America, The Plato Papers, and The Fall of Troy. He has won the Whitbread
Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature Award under the William
Heinemann Bequest (jointly), the Somerset Maugham Award, the South Bank Award
for Literature, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian
fiction prize.
He lives in London.
This biography was last updated on 11/18/2009.
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