It was a Saturday in early summer, and he was sitting in his office, a handsome, sun-flooded room with large windows that look out over a genteel square. “It’s just the way I work,” Ackroyd says. He begins by writing and doing research for a history book, turns to a biography sometime in the afternoon and finishes the day reclining on a bed in a room adjacent to his book-lined office, writing a novel, in longhand. Each morning he takes a taxi from his London home, in tony Knightsbridge, to the office he maintains in Bloomsbury, where he typically divides his workday between three books. Peter Ackroyd, the 63-year-old English novelist,īiographer, historian and author of more than 50 books, is one of those for whom writing at some point turned the corner from avocation to compulsion, and then from compulsion to continuing Olympian feat.Īckroyd writes nearly all day, nearly every day. Writers write because they have no choice, the cliché goes, but if you crunch the numbers, it’s clear that certain writers have less choice than others.
Up close and personal with Peter Ackroyd, England’s insanely prolific, controversial and eccentric novelist and historian. Tung Walsh Peter Ackroyd at his desk in Bloomsbury, where he typically writes three books simultaneously.
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