'Portraying the drama of the human spirit'

 

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 in England on Oct. 5, 1949 Ackroyd has written award-winning biographies of such luminaries like William Blake, Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot.  But it was his nearly two-dozen historical novels that first earned him acclaim.  Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards, Ackroyd is noted for the depth of his research and sheer volume of his work (nearly 50 nonfiction books, 19 novels, 4 books of poetry, and several television programs).   Since 2013, most of his work has been nonfiction, including this year's The English Soul: Faith of a Nation.

 

But it was fiction writing – starting with his 1982 novel The Great Fire of London – that  put Ackroyd on the writing map.   The book set the stage for a long sequence of novels dealing with the complex interaction of time and space and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place.” 

  

“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.”