Poe

Poe is an ideal biographical subject for Peter Ackroyd… Admirably captures the heady mix of the esoteric, grotesque and thoroughly modern in Poe * Sunday Times *With an adept ventriloquism, Ackroyd weaves together contemporary testimony and his own crisp narrative… His own elegant, even terse, prose mirrors his subject’s best, whilst it is also shot through with Poe’s anguish * Scotsman *Ackroyd is clearly fascinated by his subject. He makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe * Scotland on Sunday *Ackroyd is more like a literary spiritualist who summons up the voices of the dead and encourages them to possess his writing… It is as short and sharp as a flick-knife * Daily Telegraph *Ackroyd is clearly fascinated by his subject. He makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe * Scotland on Sunday *Poe’s brilliant, erratic, abbreviated career stands to gain rather than lose from the form of brief life patented by Ackroyd. A short biography is not a long one shrunk. Instead of patiently accumulated details, emotional complexity and architectural shaping, it operates by lightening strikes, atmospheric colouring, impressionistic techniques of concision and suggestion * Observer *200 pages of beautifully concentrated and cadenced prose * Glasgow Herald *Ackroyd tells his story straight, without moralising * Literary Review *Mr Ackroyd’s biography of a writer who dies at the age of 40 after an alcoholic bender is almost as vivid and flawed as Poe himself … Mr Ackroyd is especially good at conveying Poe’s precarious state * Economist *With an adept ventriloquism Ackroyd weaves together contemporary testimony with his own crisp narrative…a vivid recreation of the life and sensibility that lay behind the work * Evening Standard *

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London- The Biography, Thames- Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

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