David Hockney gets an official biographer

David Hockney (pictured), who ranks alongside Lucien Freud as one of Britain’s most celebrated living artists, has green-lighted an authorised biography of his life. This will come as a surprise to those who know the 71-year-old artist - he has always kept would-be chroniclers of his life at arm’s length – as will his choice of writer.

For the working-class boy from Bradford has chosen Christopher Simon Sykes, an Old Etonian and scion of the Yorkshire landed gentry. "I’m thrilled. It’s a huge challenge, by far the biggest one I’ve taken on," Sykes, who was a photographer before becoming a writer and whose publications include a coffee table book, The Big House, about his own family’s country pile, told the London Evening Standard. "He’s such an iconic figure. I got the idea while ghost writing Eric Clapton’s book. I felt it was time to do a proper biography of someone who is still alive."

"I first met David in the 1960s but I really got to know him when he came back from America to live in Yorkshire," adds the writer, who once sent up the society interior designer Nicky Haslam in a song posted on YouTube. "Although he’s 12 years older than me, he lives in the Bohemian world of the late 20th century which I’ve known all my life. It’s a milieu I understand." The book will be published by Random House in 2011.