WikiLeaks bio release 'without consent'

Publishers contracted to produce the official memoir of Julian Assange will go ahead and release the WikiLeaks founder's autobiography without his consent.

In December the Australian signed a contract with Canongate Books to write an autobiography, part memoir, part manifesto, due to be released in April.

However after working with a co-author and reading a first draft in March, Assange declared "all memoir is prostitution" before cancelling the contract in June, Canongate said in a statement.

Assange, who is currently under house arrest in Britain awaiting a High Court of Appeal ruling on whether he should be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault, now faces Thursday's release of an unauthorised autobiography.

"He had already signed his advance over to his lawyers to settle his legal bills and has not repaid the advance owed since," Canongate said.

"So the contract still stands and Canongate has decided to honour it and publish the autobiography."

Titled Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, snippets of the book will be revealed in British newspaper The Independent on Thursday.

Canongate describe the publication as "a revealing account of the man who founded the organisation whose work has dominated the news in recent years".

"It covers Julian's nomadic childhood in Australia and his life as a teenage hacker who realised, by the age of sixteen and in pre-internet days, the global potential and connectivity of the computer. 'Hacking was,' he says, 'a way for us to connect with other kids who didn't feel like hostages to normality'."

The book has been compiled using more than 50 hours of recorded talks with Assange.

Before founding WikiLeaks in 2006 Assange describes his early adult life as a "cyberpunk".

"The biggest question for me," he writes, "had become, 'how can we reduce the power of a conspiracy?' And the answer seemed within our grasp: to chase their secrets into the open air."

The online secret-leaking site has revealed hundreds of thousands of confidential political and military documents, attracting global attention and sparking investigation.

- AAP