Craig Brown's One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, has been named as the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2020. Craig Brown creates an entirely new form of biography, he captures the serendipities that brought the fab four together and catapulted them to world fame, as well as telling the story of those who came into their orbit, giving a vivid and revealing insight into the world of the swinging 60s.
Craig Brown is the author of 18 books, and a prolific journalist. He has been writing his parodic diary in Private Eye since 1989. He’s the only person ever to have won three different Press Awards – for best humorist, columnist and critic – in the same year. He has been a columnist for, among others, The Guardian, The Times, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. He currently writes for The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. His last book, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret was an international bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Award and the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Award.
Craig Brown will be in conversation with last year’s winner, Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.
The £50,000 Baillie Gifford literary prize celebrates the best in non-fiction writing and the 2020 shortlist was:
- One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time Craig Brown
- The Idea of the Brain: A History Matthew Cobb
- Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture Sudhir Hazareesingh
- Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women Christina Lamb
- Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Woman’s Life in Nineteenth-Century Japan Amy Stanley
- The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story Kate Summerscale
