Richard Appignanesi

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Appignanesi picked up a Mexican cartoonist's book about Karl Marx in 1976. He turned it into Marx for Beginners, an English translation that read like philosophy done as a comic strip. The book found readers nobody had counted on, people who wanted serious ideas without a wall of academic prose. Appignanesi was a Canadian writer and editor whose career moved between disciplines. He served as executive editor of the journal Third Text and as reviews editor of the policy studies journal Futures, alongside his publishing work. He wrote four novels, a graphic narrative about Sigmund Freud, a volume of poetry, and curated art exhibitions across Europe. What made a philosophy-trained thinker from Montreal decide that dense ideas belonged in cartoons? And how did one translated pamphlet grow into a publishing project spanning decades and more than a dozen languages?

• 2. Early Life And Education

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  Montreal is where Appignanesi was born, the son of Italian immigrants Ezio Appignanesi and Angelina Canestrari. Music came first. In 1953 he was a finalist for the E. Archambault Pour Mérite gold medal and won a scholarship to the Montreal Conservatory. He shifted toward literature, earning an Honors BA in English Literature from Loyola College, Montreal, in 1962. England pulled him across the Atlantic in 1967. By 1973 he had completed a D.Phil in Art History at the University of Sussex. His thesis examined the origins of art criticism in the classical Greek period and later phases of antiquity. In the early 1990s he returned to research, this time on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, working out of King's College, London.

• 3. The Beginners Empire

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  The Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative launched in London in 1974. Appignanesi was among its founders, alongside novelist John Berger, playwright Arnold Wesker, Lisa Appignanesi, Chris Searle and Glenn Thompson. Within a couple of years, the cooperative's experiment with illustrated nonfiction had grown into its most ambitious undertaking, an international series of illustrated documentary books. It would eventually be translated into 16 languages and sell well over a million copies. Appignanesi worked as the originating storyboard editor. His art direction earned him a Directors Club Merit Award in New York in 1980. The cooperative itself folded in 1984. Appignanesi regrouped in 1991, co-founding Icon Books with Peter Pugh and Jeremy Cox and becoming its director. He carried the same illustrated project forward under a new name, Introducing. By 2014 the Introducing series had grown to roughly 100 titles covering philosophy, politics, science and the arts. Glenn Thompson, one of the original cooperative's founders, relaunched the earlier brand separately in 1992 under the name For Beginners, LLC.

• 4. Manga Shakespeare

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  In 2007, Appignanesi turned his attention to a younger audience with a new illustrated project. Its storyboards were built from direct, unaltered quotations pulled straight from Shakespeare's original texts, rather than paraphrased dialogue. Prominent UK-based manga artists supplied the illustrations. By 2014 the project had adapted 14 of Shakespeare's plays this way. It paired centuries-old verse with a visual style built for readers raised on manga and graphic novels.

• 5. Illustrated Texts And Ideas

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  Sigmund Freud once treated a patient known as the Wolf Man, a case study now considered a founding text of modern psychoanalysis. It became the basis for The Wolf Man: Graphic Freud, an illustrated narrative Appignanesi wrote with artist Slawa Harasymowicz. Reviewers called him "a master of the graphic translation of complex cultural ideas." Inside the Beginners and Introducing series, he wrote and edited Lenin for Beginners, Freud for Beginners and Introducing Existentialism, all illustrated by Oscar Zarate. Postmodernism for Beginners and Introducing Learning and Memory were co-authored with Ziauddin Sardar. Appignanesi also wrote in a more academic register. What Do Existentialists Believe? used a series of thought experiments to trace existentialism through Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Axis Enigma compared three writers from defeated Fascist countries, Fassbinder, Mishima and Pasolini, around a shared aesthetic of sadism. In 1972 he published a volume of poetry, The Street to Damascus.

• 6. Novels And Reviews

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  Appignanesi wrote four novels in total. The first three formed a trilogy called Italia Perversa: Stalin's Orphans, The Mosque and Destroying America. He drafted them in 1967, though they were not published until the early 1980s. The trilogy's Quebecois protagonist travels across Vienna, Zagreb and Italy. His journey ends in disillusionment through separatist terrorism. The prose was demanding and highly literate. That was a sharp contrast to the more approachable style of the illustrated series, and reviews of the trilogy were ambivalent. One review called it "a tour of twentieth century European culture with inescapable echoes of Musil, Svevo and Kafka." It praised "a fretful, nervous brilliance" that, "for all its faults, jerks us out of our provincialism." Another reviewer wrote that "literary devices and ambitions almost bury this 1967 saga." But the same review added that "discussions are interesting and Mr. Appignanesi's descriptive skills are considerable." Almost two decades later, Appignanesi published a fourth novel, Yukio Mishima's Report to the Emperor. It is a fictional autobiography of the Japanese poet, novelist, playwright, film director, actor and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima, who lived from 1925 to 1970. The novel is set mainly in post-World War II Japan and in Benares, India. It builds toward Mishima's ritual suicide by seppuku. That act followed his failed right-wing coup against the Japanese government. Its tone is one of dark magical realism. The protagonist's journey moves through landscapes that are grotesque and horrific yet often lyrically rendered. Writing in the UK trade journal The Bookseller, Penny Mountain called the novel "a formidable literary achievement." She added that Appignanesi "imagines in macabre, shocking and often comic detail the life and suicide of the extraordinary Japanese writer."

• 7. Curating Culture

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  Appignanesi co-curated Pretext: Heteronyms with Juliet Steyn in 1995. It was a Rear Window exhibition of 21 artists responding to Fernando Pessoa's heteronymic personae, staged at Clink Street Studios in London. The exhibition transferred to Rome in 1997 under a new name, Heteronymous, staged at the Palazzo San Michele a Ripa. That version was curated by Juliet Steyn, Achille Bonito Oliva and Anna Maria Nassisi, alongside Appignanesi. It also staged Appignanesi's own play, Fernando Pessoa: the Man Who Never Was, directed by Marcello Sambati. In 2005, he served as program co-curator of the Writing Europe conference for the British Council in Kyiv, Ukraine. He curated Encounters in Relational Geography: Dust, Ashes, Residua, featuring seven East European artists, at Open Space, Zentrum für Kunstprojekte, in Vienna in 2010. That same year he presented an expanded version, Raising Dust: Encounters in Relational Geography, with ten artists. It ran at Calvert 22 Gallery in London into 2010-2011. In 2011, alongside Haim Bresheeth and Ali Nobil Ahmad, he co-curated Winds of Change: Cinema in Muslim Societies. The program of film exhibitions and lectures was organized by Third Text and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

• 8. Personal Life And Death

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  In 1967, Appignanesi married the writer Lisa Appignanesi, born Borensztejn. Their son, Josh Appignanesi, became a filmmaker. The marriage ended in divorce in 1984. Appignanesi also had a son, Raphael, and a daughter, Rosa, with different partners. He made his home in London, England. Richard Appignanesi died on the 8th of April, 2025, at the age of 84.