Jazz writer Alyn Shipton has written the first official biography of Harry Nilsson, which is due to be published in the UK in August. Titled Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter the singer’s estate granted the Dizzy Gillespie and Jimmy McHugh biographer access to private files and Nilsson’s own unfinished autobiography among other papers. Shipton in the book, published by Oxford University Press, traces Nilsson’s life from his Brooklyn childhood to his Los Angeles adolescence and charts his later rise to fame. The book’s publication coincides with the release of a huge 17-CD box set: Nilsson The RCA Albums Collection.