(FT) -- Julian Assange has signed book deals worth more than £1m in the US and UK, to allow the WikiLeaks founder to cover his legal fees and maintain the whistleblowing site.
He will be racing a disgruntled former colleague to release an autobiography telling his side of the WikiLeaks story. Both books are to be published by divisions of Random House next year.
Mr Assange is fighting allegations of sexual assault in Sweden while trying to continue the gradual release of thousands of US diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks.
Released on bail by the British high court in mid-December, he spent Christmas wearing a tracking tag, confined to a friend's mansion home in East Anglia.
The US administration, which has been angered and embarrassed by successive leaks of its foreign-policy secrets through WikiLeaks, is believed to be exploring ways to prosecute Mr Assange.
The controversy did not dissuade readers of Time magazine voting Mr Assange their "person of the year" for his campaign for freedom of information and radical transparency from governments.
He has agreed an $800,000 (£520,000) contract with Knopf, a US imprint of Random House, the Bertelsmann-owned publisher, and another £325,000 deal for the UK with Canongate, an independent publishing house based in Edinburgh. CNN
