Fourth Estate crowned with Queen Elizabeth II biography from Craig Brown

Fourth Estate has acquired the rights to A Voyage Around the Queen by the award-winning author Craig Brown. Publishing director Louise Haines acquired world rights direct from the author.

Having previously won the Baillie Gifford Prize and James Tait Black Award for his biographies of The Beatles and Princess Margaret respectively, Brown turns his attention to Queen Elizabeth II in his forthcoming book. 

The synopsis reads: "In A Voyage Around the Queen, Brown overturns the usual formula of royal biographies by applying his singular approach to one of the most guarded women who ever lived. With enormous wit and sharp social commentary, he examines the Queen in her time through the eyes of those who encountered her: Andy Warhol’s envy, Michelle Obama’s awe, Jackie Kennedy’s resentment, E M Forster’s affection and many more. Brown reveals her as a human looking-glass, mirroring our deepest hopes and anxieties.

"In a kaleidoscopic combination of biography, essays, cultural history, travelogue and comedy, A Voyage Around the Queen finds her painted by Rolf Harris and Lucian Freud, celebrated in verse by Ted Hughes and John Betjeman, serenaded by Jimi Hendrix, popping up in the dreams of Graham Greene and Judi Dench and tussling over a teapot with Margaret Thatcher. The book is an exhilarating and unique portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, her family, friends and enemies – and all the rest of us, too."

Haines said: "A Voyage Around the Queen is a triumph. Craig has exhaustively researched the Queen’s long life, uncovering quirky encounters that succeed in revealing the most about her and us. As ever, he has brilliantly subverted the royal biography to give a highly nuanced, original and funny portrait of her and us; he gets to the very essence of what royalty means too."

Brown added: "My aim has been to write a different kind of royal book, to broaden the usual focus and create a panorama of the late Queen and the strange and fascinating place she occupied not only in the world but in our national psyche. I think I can honestly say that this is the only book ever written about her in which Morrissey, Virginia Woolf, Robert Maxwell, Alan Bennett and Marilyn Monroe appear on an equal footing."

Craig Brown has been writing the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye since 1989. His books include One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction; and Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, which won the James Tait Black Award and The South Bank Show Sky Arts Award and was Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US.