Peter Ackroyd awarded honorary doctorate

“The university has a close association with West London, where I was educated, so I am doubly honoured,“ he said when he received the award at the Brunel graduation ceremony at the Wembley Conference Centre, in North-West London.

His metropolis-based novels include Hawksmoor, which won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, The Lambs of London and The Clerkenwell Tales. London: The Biography won The South Bank Show Award for literature.

Born in East Acton and educated in Ealing, West London, he revealed that his next work is “a study of the river Thames.“

In her citation, Brunel's Head of English, Prof. Maureen Moran described him as focusing “his distinctive vision on the mysterious interconnection between the monumental figures of history and our understanding of the contemporary world.“

His novels and biographies include such subjects as Oscar Wilde, Thomas Chatterton and Charles Dickens.

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