The Unauthorized Autobiography

"Landep News"

Julian Assange

Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, comes into the spotlight again on Thursday as he accuses, in a lengthy statement, the printing house of deciding to release his autobiography of “profiteering” and “opportunism.”
Assange said that the edition was uncorrected and the facts were not checked by him, as the work was in progress.
He stated that Canongate Publishing has published a draft of the work, and by that they have infringed the contract, breached his confidence, infringed his creative rights and the personal assurances.
He added that Canongate undermined the benefit him and WikiLeaks could have derived from selling the book, especially at a time when the costs of the legal trials of WikiLeaks and its founder, and the blockade on WikiLeaks’s funds make the activity harder.
Canongate announced that on Wednesday that it would publish on Thursday an electronic and hardback edition of a series of interviews between the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagen and the Australian editor-in-chief. The book was released in London in spite of the scandal.
The publisher announced that Assange has already used the six-figure advance the publishing house gave him to pay legal fees, so that he could not go back on the contract. Assange urges that the contract allowed him to cancel it, if he wanted to, that it had “agreed to be cancelled by all parties,” including the American publishing house Knopf.
He added that the decision made by the leadership of Canongate was not related to freedom of opinion but rather to the opportunism of the editor. Assange argued that he was caught up in his legal matters related to the attempt of the US authorities to bring him to trial and to fighting his extradition to Sweden, so that he could not dedicate attention to the book that was about to be published.

The Unauthorized Autobiography

He mentioned he had no intention to terminate contract and that he has been even willing to compromise on it, if offered the opportunity. The publisher says that he wanted to terminate the contract three months ago, after receiving $1 million in advance.
He spoke of the funds that he received in advance, and said that the money was still in the accounts of FSI “unspent,” and that it could returned to the publisher in case of a dispute over the fees.
His main concern was that he was not able to suggest the publisher some necessary deletions in the manuscript, so that lives and goods of some people be protected. In 2010, he was accused among other things about having disclosed the names of the soldiers and operatives working in the field in Afghanistan, which is said to have exposed these people to great danger.
The non-fiction director of Canongate said that Assange should “embrace” the book, which reflects everything he said to the Scottish writer. Assange is deeming it an “unfinished and erroneous draft.”

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