Ackroyd, Peter, 1949-....

Peter Ackroyd, British novelist, critic, poet, biographer, and essayist, was born in London on October 5, 1949, and raised in East Acton. Educated at Saint Benedict’s School, Ealing, he graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, in 1971 with a degree in English, and studied at Yale University under a Mellon Foundation fellowship from 1971 to 1973. Ackroyd was the literary editor of the Spectator from 1973 to 1977, and managing editor from 1977 to 1981. He is the author of more than a dozen novels, four books of poetry, and over twenty works of non-fiction, including studies of the cities of London and Venice, the authors Blake, Chaucer, Dickens, Eliot, Poe, Pound, and Shakespeare, and the cultures of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Ackroyd has won numerous literary awards, was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2003, and elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.

His partner Brian Michael Kuhn was born in New York on June 26, 1952. Ackroyd and Kuhn met while Ackroyd was studying in the United States; afterward Kuhn moved to England, living in London and Devon from 1973 until his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1994.

From the guide to the Peter Ackroyd papers, 1962-2009, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)