Peter Ackroyd  

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

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 1994 he was interviewed about the London Psychogeographical Association in an article for The Observer where he remarked:

"I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place, the past speaks . . . Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who dwell in them, is it not also possible that within this city (London) and within its culture are patterns of sensibility or patterns of response which have persisted from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond?" 'Cultists' Go Round in Circles', Barry Hugill, The Observer, Sunday, 28 August 1994

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
• The Fall of Troy – 2006

Adult 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
• The Life of Thomas More – 1988
• Ezra Pound and his World – 1989 ISBN 0500130698
• Dickens – 1990
• An Introduction to Dickens – 1991
• Blake – 1996
• London: The Biography – 2000
• Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination – 2002
• Chaucer (first in planned series of Ackroyd's Brief Lives) – 2005
• Shakespeare: The Biography – 2005
• Turner (second book in the 'Brief Lives' series) – 2006
• Newton (third book in the 'Brief Lives' series) – 2007
• Thames: Sacred River – 2007
• Poe: A life cut short – 2008

Children's non-fiction (Voyages Through Time series)

• The Beginning – 2003
• Escape From Earth – 2004
• Kingdom of the Dead – 2004
• Cities of Blood – 2004
• Ancient Greece – 2005
• Ancient Rome – 2005

Plays

• The Mystery of Charles Dickens – 2000