Peter Ackroyd

Novelist, biographer and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, and studied at Yale University as a Mellon Fellow. On his return from the US, he worked for The Spectator magazine in London as literary editor (1973-77), then as joint managing editor (1978-82) and fi lm critic. He is chief book reviewer for The Times newspaper, and a regular broadcaster on radio. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1984. Equally acclaimed for both his inventive biographies and his formally diverse fi ction, Peter Ackroyd blends past and present, fact and fi ction in his writing. One of his most recent works, ‘London: The Biography’, is an extensive and thorough discussion of the city of London through the ages. In 2002 he followed this with the monumental cultural history of England, ‘Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination’.