THE owner of Edinburgh-based publishers Canongate has said he walked away from printing the memoirs of Sir Sean Connery because of "irreconcilable differences".

Jamie Byng said that he, Connery and the co-author Murray Grigor could not see "eye-to-eye" on the direction of the project and so agreed to part ways.

Byng was speaking ahead of Sir Seans' eagerly anticipated sell-out appearance at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, where he will launch their long-awaited book Being a Scot.

The finished book is being published by Weidenfeld, but before that deal was struck Byng spent months working with Connery and Grigor on the book before their collaboration was called off.

Byng, who had hoped the book would be the nearest thing to Connery's autobiography, said: "At the end of the day we did not see eye-to-eye on what this book could and should be. For that reason we didn't want to publish it, and they (Connery and Grigor) didn't want us to publish it.

"We thought it could be a book that was absolutely personal, but it was a book about Scotland. There was some wonderful stuff, and I hope that wonderful stuff will appear in the finished book.

"Sir Sean has got a great storytelling instinct and a great eye and ear for anecdotes. There was some beautiful stuff about growing up in Edinburgh, but ultimately we couldn't agree on what the book should be."

Canongate Books

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