Craig Brown

Craig Brown is a British journalist, critic, and satirist born in 1957. He has written columns for Private Eye, The Mail on Sunday, and many other publications for over forty years, and is one of Britain's finest prose parodists. He is the author of numerous collections of parody and comic journalism, including This Is Craig Brown (2003) and Hello Goodbye Hello (2012). Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (2017, 4th Estate) is his first extended biographical work, structured as ninety-nine fragmentary chapters — anecdotes, impressions, lists, parodies, and imagined encounters — that circle around Princess Margaret (1930–2002) without ever quite producing a conventional biography. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2017 and was widely acclaimed as one of the most original books of the year. Brown's work combines genuine scholarship with comic brilliance, and his portraits of public figures are notable for their humanity alongside their satirical sharpness.