British · b. 1949
Peter Ackroyd writes about London and English history with encyclopedic appetite. "Hawksmoor" (1985) won the Whitbread Novel Award—a dual narrative linking a seventeenth-century architect with a modern detective. "Chatterton" (1987) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize—a novel about literary forgery and authenticity. Ackroyd has also written biographies of Dickens, Blake, and London itself.