Peter ackroyd foundation review6/29/2023 'I was treated with derision and contempt,' he has said of the strange position he came to occupy in English literature. The mid-Eighties, which also saw the publication of the novel (Chatterton) that many rate his best, may well have been the high-water mark of his bi-genre critical acclaim. Severely hampered by Eliot's estate, which refused him permission to use the poetry and correspondence, he looked to new, more adventurous forms of biographical narrative that would later pay handsome dividends. In between, his TS Eliot took the Whitbread biography award. In 1985, he picked up the Whitbread and Guardian fiction prizes for Hawksmoor He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1984 with his second novel, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, displaying a gift for literary ventriloquism that would become something of a signature style. Initially, he seemed to move between writing novels and biographies with equal success. In 1980, he embarked on a regime of prolific prose production, resulting in one, sometimes two books a year. But an author who can write by the yard was always unlikely to be imprisoned by the metre. Ackroyd started out in the early Seventies as a poet, publishing two obscure volumes of dense modernism.
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