The Beautiful Ones by Prince, the artistic visionary, singer, songwriter, musician, producer, actor and filmmaker, will be published by Penguin Random House in October 2019.

This official memoir will feature never-before-seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets written in Prince’s own hand, and the early pages of the memoir Prince began writing before his passing.

About the book

From Prince himself comes the brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time – an exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death.

Prince was a musical genius, one of the most talented, beloved, accomplished, popular and acclaimed musicians in history. He was also a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of ‘Uptown’ to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of ‘Paisley Park’. But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, the greatest pop star of his era.

The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince – a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him.

The book is told in four parts. The first is composed of the memoir he was writing before his death, pages that brings us into Prince’s childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us into Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album released, through a scrapbook of Prince’s writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution through candid images that take us up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book’s fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain – the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, as he retells the autobiography we’ve seen in the first three parts as a heroic journey.

The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his short but profound collaboration with Prince in his final months – a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he had so carefully cultivated – and annotations that provide context to each of the book’s images.

This work is not just a tribute to Prince, but an original and energising literary work, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image, his undying gift to the world.

Categories International Non-fiction

Tags Biography Dan Piepenbring Memoir New books New releases Penguin Random House SA Prince The Beautiful Ones