Tragic accident on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. Adrienne Vaughan, a 45-year-old American, president of the American branch of the famous British publishing house Bloomsbury, was killed on Thursday August 3 after a collision between a speedboat, on which she was, and a sailboat of 45 meters, the Guardian reported on Friday.
The American editor, who was vacationing in Italy with her husband and two children, had rented a 9m speedboat in the village of Nerano, south of Naples, when the vessel collided with the Tortuga vessel , which carried about 85 people celebrating a wedding. Adrienne Vaughan reportedly fell overboard during the collision and was fatally struck by the boat’s propeller. When emergency services arrived around 7 p.m. local time, she was already dead.
Her husband, with injuries to his limbs, was taken to Ravello hospital, alongside the two children, a 12-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy, who were not physically injured but are said to be in shock . The incident was reported in the evening, but the editor’s body was not officially identified until Friday morning.
Italian prosecutors in Salerno have opened an investigation into his death. The 30-year-old skipper of the speedboat suffered a broken pelvis and ribs, Italian news agency ANSA reported, adding that a blood test for the skipper came back positive, without it is known at this stage whether it was alcohol or drugs.
Adrienne Vaughan, educated at New York University, had worked at Disney Books and Oxford University Press before joining Bloomsbury in 2020. She was promoted to president a year later and also served on the board of the “ Association of American Publishers”. The Bloomsbury house, created in 1986, has experienced exceptional growth thanks to the publication of the Harry Potter saga by J. K. Rowling since 1997.
