Craig Brown wins top prize for non-fiction with his book about The Beatles

Daily Mail columnist Craig Brown has won Britain’s top award for non-fiction after ‘re-inventing the art of biography’ with his book on The Beatles.

Brown, 63, took the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, which was serialised in the Mail.

The writer, a former biographer of Princess Margaret, said his aim was ‘to convey the fun and excitement of The Beatles era, and the speed at which the four of them changed, both for better and worse’.

It was hailed as ‘welcomed escapism from the current situation’ as it fought off competition from Kate Summerscale’s ‘true ghost story’, The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Christina Lamb’s Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, Sudhir Hazareesingh biography of Toussaint Louverture, Black Spartacus, Matthew Cobb’s The Idea of the Brain: A History and Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Woman’s Life in Nineteenth-Century Japan.

Martha Kearney, chair of the judges, said: ‘In the deep gloom of 2020, we have discovered a shaft of light. One Two Three Four is a joyous, irreverent, insightful celebration of The Beatles, a highly original take on familiar territory.

‘It’s also a profound book about success and failure which won the unanimous support of our judges. Craig Brown has reinvented the art of biography.’

Brown said writing the book involved ‘tracking down the stories of odd-bods like The Singing Nun or leafing through old copies of the Listener magazine to find out why Anthony Burgess loathed their music with such a passion’.

His last book, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret won an international bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Award and the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Award.