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My Writing Life: Craig Brown

Craig Brown is the author of 18 books, and a journalist. He has been writing his parodic diary in Private Eye since 1989. He is 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 The Guardian, The Times, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph, among others. He currently writes for The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. His New York Times bestseller, Hello Goodbye Hello was translated into ten languages.

1. What book should every writer read?

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau.

2. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

All the newspaper and magazine editors who took a chance on me when I was starting. My prep school English teacher, Maurice Johnson, who used to read The Complete Short Stories of Saki (by H.H. Munro) to us, and also, oddly enough, passages from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.

3. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your writing career?

To remind myself each day that it’s better than the alternatives. As Tom Stoppard once said, “To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war.”

4. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

Never start an article with a quote from someone else.

5. What was the proudest moment of your writing career?

When the English actor and comedian, Peter Cook, rang me out of the blue in 1987 to tell me he liked my stuff.

6. What is your typical writing day like?

Go to my computer at about 8am. Look at newspapers online. Write a couple of paragraphs. Find myself looking up someone like Margaret Rutherford or Dave Dee or Peter Glaze on Wikipedia and YouTube. Write another couple of paragraphs. Have another cup of coffee. Repeat this cycle over and over again until about 1pm. Play croquet in the afternoon.

What are you reading right now?

A gripping, beautifully choreographed book called Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides. Also dipping in and out of various Kingsley Amis books, as I have to give a talk on him.

Bookmarker or page-folder?

I’m a page folder but aspire to bookmarkerdom.

This article originally appeared on our Substack.

Photo of Craig Brown by Nick Illott.

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