'A marvellous work of the imagination...enthralling' Ruth Rendell

Peter Ackroyd is a prize-winning writer of fiction and non fiction. Almost all his novels are historical novels: he has a unique gift for conjuring lives and characters from the past. Hawksmoor won the Guardian fiction prize, and Chatterton (also about forgery) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has written brief lives of Chaucer, Turner and Newton, and major biographies of T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, Thomas More and - most recently - Shakespeare. He holds a CBE for services to literature and lives in London.