Rayner, Samantha J; (2013) The Death of King Arthur. Arthuriana , 23 (1) pp. 73-75. 10.1353/art.2013.0007.

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Abstract

In late Autumn 2010, Peter Ackroyd’s The Death of King Arthur was released in hardback by Penguin in the UK. When asked where the idea for the book came from, Alexis Kirschbaum, Editorial Director at Penguin Classics, revealed that she had commissioned it herself. She had a belief that the time was right for a more accessible version of Malory—and chose Ackroyd as the writer best fitted to bring that belief to market. This was good business sense: Ackroyd’s name has cultural capital, and would have impact on the review circuit as well as on bookshop shelves. His work includes an imaginative remediation of Chaucer in The Clerkenwell Tales, a biography, Chaucer: Brief Lives, and a modern retelling of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for Penguin Classics, (a brave move since Neville Coghill’s verse translation was and is still on their lists and is still the best known and cited modern version). Like Caxton five hundred years earlier, Kirschbaum wanted to bring Malory to a wider readership. As Editorial Director of the Penguin Classics titles, it is her role to keep that list appealing to readers, drawing in new ones and tempting those already familiar with canonical texts to read them again.

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