RANDOM HOUSE CANADA TO PUBLISH HOPE THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF POPE FRANCIS THE FIRST MEMOIR WRITTEN BY A SITTING PONTIFF
Random House Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada, will publish HOPE, the autobiography of Pope Francis in Canada.
Italian publisher Mondadori made the announcement today at the Frankfurt Book Fair and will manage world rights.
HOPE, which took the Pontiff six years to write, will be published simultaneously worldwide in principal languages and in over 80 countries next January in time for the 2025 Jubilee of Hope. An audiobook edition will be released simultaneously in English by Penguin Random House Audio. The book cover image was also released and can be viewed here.
Written with Carlo Musso, former non-fiction editorial director of Piemme and Sperling & Kupfer, and then founder of the independent publisher Libreria Pienogiorno, in accordance with the wishes of Pope Francis, this unprecedented memoir was originally intended to be published after the Pope’s passing. The announcement of the new Jubilee of Hope in 2025 inspired him to make this legacy available now. “It has been a long, intense adventure that has taken up the past six years: work on writing it began in March 2019 and will be completed in the forthcoming weeks,” Musso commented.
“The book of my life is the story of a journey of hope, a journey that I cannot separate from the journey of my family, of my people, of all God’s people. In every page, in every passage, it is also the book of those who have traveled with me, of those who came before, of those who will follow,” offers Pope Francis. “An autobiography is not our own private story, but rather the baggage we carry with us. And memory is not just what we recall, but what surrounds us. It doesn’t speak only about what has been, but about what will be. It seems like yesterday, and yet it’s tomorrow. All is born to blossom in an eternal springtime. In the end, we will say only: I don’t recall anything in which You are not there.”
With a wealth of revelations and unpublished stories, moving and very human, poignant and dramatic, but also capable of real humour, Francis’s memoir begins in the early years of the twentieth century with the story of his Italian roots and his ancestors’ adventure of emigration to Latin America, moving on to his childhood, adolescence, choice of vocation, adult life, covering the whole of his papacy up to the present day. A text of great narrative force in which the Pope through his autobiographical account addresses candidly, courageously and prophetically some of the most important and controversial questions of our current times, as well as the crucial moments of his service as universal pastor of the Catholic Church.
Destined to fascinate readers throughout the world and to represent a legacy of hope for future generations, HOPE will be enhanced by remarkable photographs, including private and unpublished material made personally available by the Pope.
These are the publishers now involved in the publication: Italy Mondadori, USA Random House, Random House Canada, UK Viking, France Albin Michel, Germany Penguin Random House / Kösel-Verlag, Spain Penguin Random House, Portugal Penguin Random House, Brazil Companhia das letras, Croatia Znanje, Slovakia Ikar, Hungary Kossuth Kiado, Romania Polirom, Greece Gutenberg Dardanos, Korea Catholic Publishing House, Catalonia Penguin Random House / Rosa del vents, Poland Swiat Ksiazki, Lithuania Lithuanian Writers Union.
Random House Canada is the publisher of the finest books by Canadian and international writers, be they new voices or beloved greats. Nonfiction or fiction, these books encompass a dazzling range of prize winners and bestsellers that have delighted, surprised and inspired Canadians, changing the way we think about the most important issues of our time. The Random House Canada list has been recognized with the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, the National Business Book Award, the Writers’ Trust Rogers Fiction Award among many, many others.
