Who was Richard Appignanesi?
Richard Appignanesi was a Canadian writer and editor, born in Montreal on the 20th of December, 1940. He was best known as the originating editor of the For Beginners and Introducing illustrated book series.
Questions about Richard Appignanesi
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is the For Beginners book series that Richard Appignanesi created?
The For Beginners series grew out of Appignanesi's 1976 English translation of a Mexican cartoonist's book on Karl Marx. It became the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative's most ambitious project. It was translated into 16 languages and sold well over a million copies. It was later renamed the Introducing series under Icon Books, reaching roughly 100 titles by 2014.
What is Manga Shakespeare, the series Richard Appignanesi founded?
Manga Shakespeare, launched by Appignanesi in 2007, adapts Shakespeare's plays using storyboards built from direct, unaltered quotations from the original texts. Illustrated by prominent UK-based manga artists, it had covered 14 of Shakespeare's plays by 2014.
What novels did Richard Appignanesi write?
Richard Appignanesi wrote four novels. The first three formed the trilogy Italia Perversa: Stalin's Orphans, The Mosque and Destroying America, drafted in 1967 and published in the early 1980s. The fourth was Yukio Mishima's Report to the Emperor, a fictional autobiography of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.
What art exhibitions did Richard Appignanesi curate?
Richard Appignanesi co-curated Pretext: Heteronyms in London in 1995 and its follow-up Heteronymous in Rome in 1997, both responding to Fernando Pessoa. He later curated Encounters in Relational Geography in Vienna in 2010 and Raising Dust at Calvert 22 Gallery in London in 2010-2011. He also co-curated Winds of Change: Cinema in Muslim Societies in 2011.
When did Richard Appignanesi die?
Richard Appignanesi died on the 8th of April, 2025, at the age of 84.