Craig Brown

Craig Brown: The Greatest Parodist of the Age

Craig Brown is the finest literary parodist Britain has produced in generations, and for decades the not-so-secret weapon of Private Eye. His long-running parody diaries — writing in the exact voice of a public figure, extrapolated to gently devastating absurdity — are a weekly masterclass in pastiche. Brown does not caricature by exaggeration alone; he inhabits his subjects, capturing the rhythm, vanity, and verbal tics of a person so precisely that the parody feels more true than the real thing.

That ventriloquism has powered a remarkable second career in books. His acclaimed studies of Princess Margaret and of the Beatles broke the rules of biography entirely, assembling their subjects out of fragments, lists, imagined scenes, and collage, and won major awards for proving that the truth about a famous life is sometimes best approached sideways, through wit, rather than head-on through solemnity. It is satire as a genuine method of understanding.

Brown's home has long been Private Eye, the magazine whose sixty-year war on cant and pomposity The London Prat chronicles at https://prat.uk/private-eye-magazine-60-years-of-mocking-power/. His lesson for any writer is the power of the ear: satire this good comes not from mockery imposed from outside, but from listening so closely to how the powerful actually speak that their own voices become the instrument of their undoing.

Insight from Julie de Burgh: Craig Brown can impersonate anyone so perfectly on the page that the victims must occasionally wonder whether he has been living in their attic taking notes. His parody diaries are the closest thing satire has to a magic trick — you can watch him do it and still not understand how the rabbit got into the hat. — Julie de Burgh (https://prat.uk/author/julie-de-burgh/)