‘Julian Assange couldn’t bear his own secrets’: ghostwriter speaks out

Award-winning Andrew O'Hagan reveals WikiLeaks founder's behaviour $2.5m book deal imploded because Assange changed his mind O'Hagan found him inconsistent, vain, funny, proud - a Peter Pan

By Abigail Frymann

PUBLISHED: 12:26 EST, 22 February 2014 | UPDATED: 12:41 EST, 22 February 2014

The writer who was working with Julian Assange's failed 2011 autobiography has for the first time described what it was like collaborating with the WikiLeaks founder who he found by turns inconsistent, passionate, funny, lazy, courageous, vain, paranoid, moral and manipulative.

Andrew O'Hagan, an award-winning, Booker-nominated writer, was drafted in by publishers Canongate to ghost-write but as the deadline loomed Assange was increasingly uncomfortable about the whole venture and one of the highest profile book deals of recent times collapsed.

Canongate had sold books in more than 40 countries for a staggering US$2.5m before the deal imploded.

Complex: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose behaviour O'Hagan sheds light on

O'Hagan told his story in a lengthy essay for the London Review of Books, a version of which he delivered in a lecture in London last night, the Guardian reported.

Ultimately, the book deal collapsed, O'Hagan wrote, because Assange had never wanted to write it.

'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. He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning,' he said.

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'Julian Assange couldn't bear his own secrets': ghostwriter speaks out