A rare talk from the Wu Ming Foundation - a collective of novelists based in Italy, a country that is (in their words) “living its darkest period since the old days of fascist dictatorship (1922-1945).”

Like their bestselling cult novel, Q (1999), about the ups-and-downs of the Reformation in sixteenthcentury Europe, written under the nom-de-plume of Luther Blissett, Wu-Ming’s new novel ‘Manituana’ is an immaculately researched epic novel. Written like a thriller, this cinematic adventure throws a window open onto the landscape of the American Revolution from the perspective of history’s losers.

In the decade since Q, the members of Wu Ming have fine-tuned their unique collective writing practice and honed their masterful, definitive take on gripping, fast-paced historical fiction drawing on elements of noir and the adventure narrative.

Wu Ming align their brand of metahistorical fiction with the New Italian Epic – distinguished by an explicit political and social concern for the future that is often conveyed through allegory and alternative histories or realities.

“Manituana unspools mesmerisingly like an old Hollywood movie.”
Todd McEwen, Guardian

“A highly compelling epic of great beauty and power.” Daily Mail

“a cartography of the possible, a set of literary tools through which the engine of history can be dismantled.” Roberto Saviano, author of the New Italian Epic Gomorrah,

The “communitarian” use of the Internet is central to the work of Wu Ming, who have long been masters of the creative potential of the Internet. The interactive website for Manituana (www.manituana.com) enables the world of the novel to be expanded and enriched, offering background to the deeply researched novel with chronologies, maps and side stories. Fans are invited to contribute fiction, music and artwork to the world of the story via the website. All of Wu Ming’s work is available under ‘copyleft’, which allows reproduction in electronic form for non-commercial purposes.

About the Wu Ming Foundation

From the summer of 1994, hundreds of artists and social activists across Europe adopted the name of a football player of Afro-Caribbean origins from Watford as a collective alias, forming the movement known as the Luther Blissett Project. ‘Luther Blissett’ became the perpetrator of media hoaxes and pranksterism played out as art, targeting the hollowness of the media industry, as well as solidarity campaigns championing the victims of censorship. ‘Luther Blissett’ fulfilled the role of a ‘Robin Hood of the information age’: a pop-folk phenomenon, the very expression of legend in an age of no more heroes.

In December 1999, the original Italian branch of the Luther Blissett Project committed symbolic seppuku (samurai ritual suicide): the Five Year Plan of guerrilla disinformation warfare had drawn to a close.

In 2000, 5 members of the community re-grouped as Wu Ming – this moniker refers specifically to the literary band. ‘Wu Ming’ means either ‘no name’, and is commonly used by Chinese dissidents, or ‘5 names’, depending on how you stress the syllables. Wu Ming are now 4, but they have kept the name that perfectly expresses their constant play with ideas of identity and authorship, and which acts as both a tribute to dissidence and a refusal of the celebrity machine. They refuse to be photographed.