About Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd (born 5 October 1949) is an English novelist, biographer and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. He is noted for his "technically innovative novels", the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, Ackroyd won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. == Early life and education == Ackroyd was born in London and brought up on a council estate in East Acton, in what he has described as a "strict" Roman Catholic household by his mother and grandmother, after his father disappeared from the family home. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. He was educated at St Benedict's, Ealing, and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon fellow at Yale University. == Work == The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and re-examining the works of other London-based writers.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.