Julian Assange biographer Andrew O’Hagan breaks silence on WikiLeaks

The ghostwriter who collaborated with Julian Assange on his abortive 2011 autobiography has broken his silence to describe his months working with the WikiLeaks founder, which culminated in the collapse of the high-profile book deal.

Two years after he was first introduced to the Australian, Andrew O'Hagan has now spoken out about how he worked with Assange on the book, which he said publisher Canongate had sold in more than 40 countries for a total of US$2.5 million before the deal imploded.

In an essay for the London Review of Books, a version of which he delivered in a lecture in London last week, O'Hagan describes working with a character who was, by turns, passionate, funny, lazy, courageous, vain, paranoid, moral and manipulative.

The book deal ultimately collapsed, O'Hagan writes, because "the man who put himself in charge of disclosing the world's secrets simply couldn't bear his own. The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses".

Assange, he writes, was persuaded to agree to the autobiography by his lawyers who said the sums on offer would cover his mounting legal costs.

He had initially been enthusiastic about the project, telling his ghostwriter that he "hoped to have something that read like Hemingway", and suggesting ever more avant garde styles for the book to take, such as writing the first chapter with one word, the second with two, and so on.