Man accused of stealing unpublished books arrested

10 January 2022

An Italian man who has been using deception for several years to obtain unpublished manuscripts from well-known authors, has been arrested. Targets of Filippo Bernardini, who works at a London publishing house, included Margaret Atwood and Sally Rooney.

In an interview with The Bookseller in 2019, Atwood confirmed there had been “concerted efforts to steal the manuscript” of her book The Testaments, before it was released. “There were lots of phoney emails from people trying to winkle even just three pages, even just anything,” she noted. According to The Guardian and The New York Times, author Sally Rooney and actor Ethan Hawke were also targeted in a similar manner.