[In the following interview, Ackroyd discusses his literary career, his imaginative historical fiction, and the interrelationship between his work as a biographer and novelist.]

At 38, Peter Ackroyd has stakes planted in several literary camps. Ackroyd came to prominence four years ago with his biography of T. S. Eliot. Since then, his novel Hawksmoor—a dark, violent tale that slips between past and present, rendered partly in 18th century prose—has become a cult phenomenon in his native England. His new novel Chatterton—based in part on the life of the literary hoaxer—was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.

Ackroyd talks to PW in his London flat—modern, spare, but discerningly decorated. For a man who writes chilling scenes of young lads having their throats slit by mad architects in churchyards, Ackroyd has a particularly jolly sense of humor. His works range from a book on esthetic criticism to a nonfiction book on cross-dressing, and include biographies of Ezra Pound, four novels, among them The Great Fire of London and The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, and a good deal of poetry published by small presses.

It’s unusual, PW comments, to be biographer and fiction writer. “I think there’s not much difference between them,” Ackroyd says. “They’re much the same process. Fiction’s often more factual than biography and far more precise. You can insist that things happen the way they ought to happen. Biography has to be an act of interpretation. No one ever knows what happened. I can’t remember what I did yesterday; imagine trying to reconstruct what happened 200 years ago.

“Certainly writing fiction and biography takes many of the same skills. You’re interested in plot, character, action, theme. All the so-called technical accomplishments of fiction are also present in biography. And that, for the writer, is the most important part of anything, the technique of it. In that sense there isn’t much distinction to be drawn between the two.

“People are beginning to realize that you can introduce experimental devices into biography. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t present the same scene three different ways in a biography; there’s no reason why you shouldn’t admit defeat at a certain point: I don’t know what happened next. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t use pastiche or parody of the subject’s style within the biography.”

Ackroyd is currently working on the biography of Dickens he began while writing Hawksmoor (this, he says, will be his final biography) as well as a novel concerned with archeology and astronomy. “I’m a biographer by chance and a novelist by choice. Someone said I was a biographer by trade, which I thought not only an insult but also untrue in terms of practically any standard you want to measure—income, time spent or vocation. It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I hate being called a biographer—it’s like being called a private eye.”

Ackroyd writes fiction in the mornings, biography in the afternoons and journalism in the evenings. “One needs some kind of challenge doing these sorts of things. Everyone told me I shouldn’t do Eliot—it couldn’t be done because of all the restrictions on the estate. The more obstacles that were put in my way, the more I decided that was the best thing for me to do. I did by chance discover that most of Eliot’s letters were in the public domain. Most people fell at the first fence: after getting a strongly worded letter from the widow Eliot, they panicked and gave up, so they didn’t know this stuff was available.

“Similarly with Dickens. Everyone said I shouldn’t do Dickens because he had been done so many times. Again, it was the element of jumping the hurdles that made it interesting for me.”

Born in 1949, Ackroyd grew up in a council house estate of a working-class suburb of London. His grandfather was a van driver for Harrod’s, his father left home when he was young and he was brought up by his mother and grandmother. “It was a perfectly ordinary childhood,” he maintains. Probably the “biggest jolt” came when, at 10, he won a state scholarship to a Catholic public school. “I was lifted out of the environment I knew and placed in an environment of learning and study and ambition.

“It sounds like Barry Manilow,” Ackroyd jests. “I was just reading his autobiography. He had a childhood very similar to mine.” Peter Ackroyd, the Barry Manilow of English writers? PW asks. “The Madonna of English writers,” he counters.

Ackroyd went on to Cambridge, where he read English Literature, then to Yale on a Mellon Fellowship. He speaks of his time in the States as having “a sense of romance, because I got introduced to people I’d always admired: John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch and a young poet called David Shapiro. It was a revelation to me to meet these people, and the artists and writers I met through them. I was very young, 21 or 22. It was my first contact with the literary world.”

Once Ackroyd left Yale, he went back to England and at 24 was offered the position of literary editor of the Spectator, the prestigious English weekly. “I don’t know why they offered me the job,” he says. “Looking back, it was a very peculiar thing for them to do. I think they were desperate. But I enjoyed doing it. The entry into journalism was a godsend, because it taught me vaguely how to write for an audience.” Ackroyd subsequently became joint managing editor of the Spectator, where he remained until 1981, when he took up writing full-time. Now, too, he is the chief book reviewer for the Times of London, covering primarily nonfiction.

The counterpointing of past and present is a device Ackroyd uses often in his work. “Certainly in Chatterton, the imagination feeds off of these images of the past,” Ackroyd says. In Chatterton, the painting of the dead poet by Henry Wallace, which hangs at the Tate Gallery, features prominently. “I use that painting as a way of organizing my material, a source of inspiration. My original idea was that Chatterton had faked his own death and was carrying on writing. I began with that story. The rest of it emerged as I started to write.

“My general obsession with the past—I don’t understand it; it just suddenly started happening. That’s the curious things about these books: I’ve never understood what they’re really about. I eagerly wait for someone’s reaction to tell me, since they always rather baffle me. All these themes which apparently appear—I don’t impose them consciously on the books, they somehow just emerge. It wasn’t until I began writing the Oscar Wilde book that I realized I was able to understand the past in a kind of concrete way, think myself back into it. It’s been a sort of education at the public’s expense. I discover what I’m interested in as I write.

“This business about not knowing what I’m doing doesn’t mean that I’m romantically tearing out my hair or drinking absinthe. I don’t agonize over it. It’s almost like having an office job. I just sit there and write it as it comes. I’ve kept the same routine since I began writing novels; it seems to be the only way I can work. As soon as I leave the room, I stop thinking about the novel. Next day, I see where I stopped the day before, and it seems to come straight away.”

Ackroyd writes so evocatively about eccentricity and violence that readers often wonder about him. “Everyone thought that I must be very weird to have written a book like Hawksmoor. One of the people who worked in my publishing house wouldn’t have the book in her home because she thought it was too spooky. I thought, oh my God, what have I unleashed upon the world? People started making tours around the churches in East London [which provide settings for the novel’s murders] and someone wrote in an essay that she’d seen this character whom I created in a dark robe inside one of the churches. So I had to write a comedy after this, just to convince everyone I wasn’t a cross between Alistair Crowley and whomever. For me, it was really a technical exercise. The moment people started being horrified by it, and in some cases, not wanting to read the book, I realized it had much more effect than I’d ever intended.”

Ackroyd shies from discussion of the meaning of the writer’s psychological state in his work. “If anything, I draw my inspiration from the English inheritance. Someone said that the novels I write really have no connection with the novels of my contemporaries, or even with the period itself. I think that’s probably true. I was always interested in the Victorian novel, which is very heavy and symbolic and colorful, with a variety of moods going from grotesque farce to tragedy.”

The theme of plagiarism figures largely in Chatterton. “In fact, Chatterton did plagiarize as well as fake,” Ackroyd says. “The history of English literature is really the history of plagiarism. I discovered that when I was doing T. S. Eliot. He was a great plagiarist. He borrowed texts from other writers. I see nothing wrong with it; I would do it myself. I’m always looking for someone I can steal from. The novel I’m writing now is partly set in Dorset, where I live half the time. I’m reading Thomas Hardy’s novels to see what I can take, because it saves me the trouble of doing it myself. Everybody does it, but some people pretend not to. People get so hung up on the idea of originality and authenticity and sincerity, which is a very modern concept, and they fail to see the beauty of theft.”

One of the characters in Chatterton eats paper, a trait, Ackroyd says, that was stolen from Oscar Wilde. “That was one of his habits. He used to take off bits of wallpaper, too, and put them in his mouth. I use it as a joke. In one of the reviews someone said it was a symbol of what I did with my own fiction—take bits of other people’s books and eat them.”

Ackroyd is often cited for writing what some refer to as pastiche. “I don’t think of it as pastiche; it’s just another way of writing. Certainly that’s the way I wrote Hawksmoor. The only way of getting a grip on the past as far as I was concerned was to write in the language of the past. The pastiche element never occurred to me. I never thought that was what I was doing, I was simply writing a new kind of historical fiction. In the novels in which it does occur, it had a serious purpose: to suggest the difference between past and present in terms of language. It’s actually a lot of hard work; pastiche makes it sound easy. You have to immerse yourself in the period for months and months. The whole end of it, of course, is to write it as easily as you write modern prose, and that takes a while to achieve.”

Ackroyd’s life revolves almost exclusively around his work. “School and university and this—it’s been a constant slog. But I hate writers who complain about their lot. They could easily do something else—be bus conductors if they wanted. They don’t have to be novelists. So I’m not complaining [although] I don’t have much of a life. I never did want one particularly. I have no friends, no social life, no interests, no hobbies.” We offer our disbelief. “I go out for dinner in the evenings occasionally,” Ackroyd relents with a twinkle. “But ever since I was a boy, the thing I most do is work.”