• 2 Seas Represents: World English, Dutch, French and Nordic rights
• Rights sold: Germany (Heyne, at auction)
• English sample available

MEMOIR

Sex (and a lot of it), motorbikes and rock’n’roll: Vanni Oddera is the bad boy of freestyle motocross. In this book he explains that what he is doing as: “I am waiting out for kidney disease.” – Il Venerdì, La Repubblica

Oddera has a visceral attachment to mankind, demonstrated by the author in his text of disability mototherapy in his book The Great Jump, “That is how I realized that love for others makes me happy.” A text that follows a tough guy who declares he does not have an Achilles heel, except for two things: darkness and dizziness. – La Verità

And so I managed to overcome all material obstacles, winning for myself a space where nothing was unattainable except for infinity. That space was the woods. I grew up in the woods. I was a child of the woods.

A wild, gawky child who prefers the company of animals to that of his peers. He has a special bond with his grandfather – his teacher and accomplice – and a profound relationship with the woods, the only place where he finds freedom and harmony. A “wildlife” from childhood and adolescence onwards, in constant search of a frontier, to cross, a rule to break.

This is Vanni and this is his great dream: to jump the obstacle, to fill the unbearable void we all have inside us. He had a life of headlong leaps and tragic falls, yet one in which he has always picked himself up again, inspired by a courage and an energy that reach beyond all limits. And this is his eventful and moving story.

Vanni Oddera, world freestyle champion, is not only the hero of daring feats in the saddle of his bike but a sincere person who is not ashamed of his own faults and excesses and is capable of devoting himself to others with enormous generosity: it’s the “drug of love for the world”, the joy of bringing the gift of the “wind in your hair” to someone who’s never experienced a similar euphoria. The lonely, difficult child won his personal battle, clearing away all the barriers and wiping out fear. And he’s never stopped flying since.