Peter Ackroyd is the author of the best selling book London: The Biography. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award (jointly), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is also the holder of a CBE for services to literature.

After obtaining a double first from Cambridge and a period in America as Mellon Fellow at Yale, he turned to journalism and writing. His first biography was about Ezra Pound and his first novel about Oscar Wilde, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award. He went on to write biographies of T.S.Eliot, Dickens, Blake and Thomas More. He’s also written short books on Chaucer and Turner.

Peter’s historical fiction includes Hawksmoor which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and Chatterton, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent novels are The Clerkenwell Tales and The Lambs of London.

He has written and presented two television series for the BBC – Dickens in 2002 and London in 2004. The Romantics is Peter's latest  television work, which he has written and also presents.