The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

« Headlines

Mandela's year on run

14.12.07 Alison Flood

Weidenfeld & Nicolson has paid a six-figure sum for world rights in Young Mandela, a biography of Nelson Mandela covering the period before his imprisonment in 1962.

The book will be written by Sunday Times Magazine investigative journalist David James Smith. Publisher Alan Samson, who came up with the concept for the book, bought world rights from Georgina Capel at Capel & Land. He will publish in February 2010.

Young Mandela will detail Mandela’s life in the early 1960s, when he spent a year on the run preparing a campaign of violence to overthrow apartheid. It follows W&N’s Young Stalin, which has sold 13,153 copies to date through Nielsen BookScan.

“A 27-year jail sentence is serious stuff, and I always had it at the back of my mind that there must be a back story about why the regime saw him in such a sinister light,” said Samson, who published Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom for Little, Brown in 1994.

Rights deal Weidenfeld Capel & Land Alison Flood