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. The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. In 1972, he was a Mellon fellow at Yale University. Benedict's, Ealing, and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. 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.Īckroyd was born in London and raised 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 is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. Peter Ackroyd CBE, FRSL (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. From the BBC programme Desert Island Discs.
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