“It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should
seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a
story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It
is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.” – Peter Ackroyd
Born
on Oct. 5, 1949 Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist
and critic noted for the depth and clarity of his writing. While he has written terrific biographical pieces on such luminaries as William Blake, Charles Dickens and
T.S. Eliot, it's his historical
novels that have earned him most acclaim, including the Somerset Maugham Award and
two Whitbread Awards.
His 1982 novel The Great
Fire of London, a reworking of Dickens’ Little Dorrit, first put Ackroyd on the writing map and set the stage
for his long sequence of novels dealing with the complex
interaction of time and space -- what he refers to as "the spirit of
place.”
Although he was a late arrival into the writing world, he has now penned nearly 70
books -- the latest being this year's The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern -- and four collections of poetry.
“I don’t think I ever read a novel
until I was 26 or 27,” he said. “I wanted
to be a poet … (and) had no interest in fiction or biography and precious
little interest in history. But those
three elements in my life have become the most important.”
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