Hugh Candidus (c. 1095 – c. 1160)
The monk who wrote Peterborough Abbey’s history and gave us the phrase “the golden borough”. Hugh Candidus, his chronicle, and how the text survived.
Search Results
Charles A Hall (1872-1965)
Long before nature writing became a publishing category, a minister from Eastfield was teaching Edwardian Britain how to look at a pond.
Richard V. Reeves
Peterborough-born writer and social scientist Richard V. Reeves has built an international career examining social mobility, class, family life and the changing circumstances of boys and men.
David Pinner (1940–2025)
The man who wrote the novel behind The Wicker Man was born in Peterborough, and came back to write a play about Hereward the Wake.
Benjamin Dean
Peterborough has produced its share of writers, but few have travelled as quickly from local comprehensive to national bookshelf as Benjamin Dean.
Charles Kingsley (1819–1875)
Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) was a prominent Victorian clergyman, historian, social reformer and author, remembered for works including The Water-Babies, Westward Ho! and Hereward the Wake.
Edmund Gill Swain (1861-1938)
The vicar of Stanground turned his Fen-edge parish into the haunted village of Stoneground. E. G. Swain’s 1912 ghost tales and his Peterborough connection.
John Davys Beresford (1873-1947)
Born at Castor Rectory and educated partly in Peterborough, John Davys Beresford became a prolific novelist, critic and speculative writer whose imagined superchildren, pandemics and dystopian societies helped shape early British science fiction.
L P Hartley (1895-1972)
Born in Whittlesey and raised at Fletton Towers in Peterborough, L. P. Hartley became an award-winning novelist, critic and master of psychological unease. His most famous novel, The Go-Between, gave English literature one of its most enduring descriptions of the power of the past.
John Clare (1793–1864)
John Clare (1793–1864) is celebrated as one of England’s finest rural poets, famed for capturing the beauty of the countryside and the voices of rural life with rare authenticity.
John Fletcher (1579–1625)
Raised for part of his childhood within Peterborough’s Cathedral precincts, John Fletcher became the leading dramatist of the King’s Men after Shakespeare and one of the most successful playwrights of the Jacobean stage.