A 'living attempt to reach into the world and heart of Shakespeare'. Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, a book by a writer about a writer, this marvellous biography is a tour de force

"You will not find a better book on Shakespeare . . . Ackroyd has genuinely set a new standard for accounts of Shakespeare's life."
-Colin MacCabe, "Independent"
"If you were to read only one book on Shakespeare, you would do well with this one."
-Allan Massie, "Literary Review"
"Shakespeare: The Biography is everything one would expect from a biographer at the top of his game . . . his recreation of London life is masterful. He knows the plays and understands better than academic biographers how Shakespeare went about researching and writing . . . His biography ranks with the best of them."
-"Financial Times"
"His biography is conventional, even cautious; grounded in common sense and wide reading, and written with the sensibility of a working novelist."
-Nicholas Shakespeare, "Saturday Telegraph"

Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. He achieved a Double First at Cambridge and studied in America at Yale as a Mellon Fellow. His first two publications were books of poetry; his first biography was about Ezra Pound and his first novel was about Oscar Wilde. He is a successful novelist (taking most of his backgrounds from history) and has written biographies of T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake and Thomas More, as well as short books on Chaucer and Turner. He has written and presented three TV series for the BBC (Dickens, London and the Romantic POets) and is the author of London: the biography and Albion: the origins of the English Imagination. He has been awarded a CBE for services to Literature, and lives in London.