
Publisher Canongate has acquired the rights the actor’s diaries from Natalie Galustian, which will be published as The Diaries of Alan Rickman in autumn 2022. Rickman began writing the diaries by hand in the early 1990s, with the intention that they would one day be published. By then, his acting career had truly kicked off, him having already built a reputation at the Royal Shakespeare Company and on stage as Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
He continued to keep diaries over the next 25 years, all the while appearing in films including Galaxy Quest, the Harry Potter franchise, Sense and Sensibility, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Love, Actually. He wrote right until his death in 2016, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 69.
The Diaries of Alan Rickman will be edited by Alan Taylor, editor of the Scottish Review of Books, who put together The Country Diaries, a treasury of pastoral journals by the likes of Beatrix Potter, Dorothy Wordsworth and John Fowles, for Canongate.
“I’m delighted that Canongate will be publishing Alan’s diaries, and couldn’t have wished for a finer appointment of editor than Alan Taylor,” said Rima Horton, Rickman’s widow, who was with him since 1965. “The diaries reveal not just Alan Rickman the actor, but the real Alan – his sense of humour, his sharp observation, his craftsmanship and his devotion to the arts.”
Taylor told the Guardian that Rickman’s diaries were “anecdotal, indiscreet, witty, gossipy and utterly candid, they make compulsive reading and offer a peerless insight into the daily life of a remarkable actor who was as beloved in the US as he surely was in the UK.”
Simon Thorogood, editorial director at Canongate, who bought the rights at auction, said that Rickman “fans everywhere are in for a rare treat”.
The Diaries of Alan Rickman will be published by Canongate around the world, and by Holt in the US.
From The Guardian article | Sian Cain