This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News
Bono to publish memoir
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 11 May 2022
Bono has announced that he will publish a first memoir, ‘Surrender’, later this year. As well as writing the book, he has also created original drawings to accompany each chapter.
“When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs”, he says. “The people, places, and possibilities in my life”.
Explaining the title, he goes on: “Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the 70s with my fists up – musically speaking – it was not a natural concept. A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book”.
“I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress… With a fair amount of fun along the way”.
The book covers the musician’s early years in Dublin, finding himself in one of the world’s most successful bands, and his activism against AIDS and poverty. Although he did manage to write it before he played a gig in a Ukrainian bomb shelter, so there’s definitely more he could write about in the future.
‘Surrender’ will be published by Penguin Random House imprint Hutchinson Heinemann on 1 Nov. You can hear Bono read an expert from the book here:
