Jonathan Coe is the winner of the £30,000 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2005 for his book Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson published by Picador.

B.S. Johnson was a brilliant working-class writer, compared to Joyce and so wedded to innovation that he cut holes in the pages of his novels. He published a novel in a box so that its unbound chapters could be read in any order. He was found dead at his north London home in November 1973.

The biography is based upon unique access to the vast collection of papers Johnson left behind, and upon dozens of interviews with those who knew him best.

Coe writes enticingly, with the quiet fever of the bookish detective, but he treads softly. He uses all manner of means - tricks straight out of Johnson’s top drawer - to ensure that we see his book for what it is: as merely one way of telling an impossible story.

There are wry footnotes and an intrusive narrator; there are disarming moments when the author declares himself too bored, or too confused, to tell us more. There is even, marshalled at the end of the book, a kind of crowd scene - a cacophony of voices, each one distilling its own essence of BSJ, with no interference from the man with the Dictaphone. The result is more than insightful. It tells you everything about the quicksand on which the biographer wobbles.

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. An award-winning novelist, biographer and critic, his novels include What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep and The Closed Circle. He was recently made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.