SOURCE: “Interview with Peter Ackroyd,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 208-20.

In the following interview, originally conducted on November 23, 1995, Ackroyd discusses his early life, his literary influences, his development from poet to novelist and biographer, and his views on English culture, creative imagination, and Catholicism.

Born in London in 1949, of working-class background, Peter Ackroyd—poet, biographer, reviewer, and novelist—won international repute after the publication of his third novel, Hawksmoor (1985), which was awarded the Whitbread Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. One of the most original and fertile British writers of the 1980s, on a par with novelists such as John Banville, Julian Barnes, Charles Palliser, Salman Rushdie, Rose Tremain, and Jeanette Winterson, Ackroyd considers his poetry, his biographies, and his novels simply as “writing,” the result of the same creative impulse.¹

Outstanding features of the biographies and...