Peter Ackroyd (born October 5 1949 in London) is a British author.

Ackroyd attended Clare College, Cambridge as an undergraduate and was a Mellon Fellow at Yale, 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 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 the monumental cultural history of England, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination.

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.

Works

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

Non-fiction

• Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism – 1976
• Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession – 1979
• T. S. Eliot; A Life – 1984
• Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision – 1987
• Ezra Pound and his World – 1989
• Dickens – 1990
• An Introduction to Dickens – 1991
• Blake – 1996
• London: The Biography – 2000
• Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination – 2002.

External links

• A more in-depth biography
• Excerpt from London: The Biography