Leona Lewis will soon join the ranks of Winston Churchill, Helen Keller and Gandhi by writing an autobiography. The chart-topping singer has signed a contract with publishers Hodder & Stoughton, with the aim to release the book in October.

Since winning the 2006 season of The X Factor, Lewis has broken sales records, serenaded Mandela and performed at the Beijing Olympics with Jimmy Page. The book will include over 100 new photographs, suggesting that pictures – and not meticulous prose - will be the means by which Lewis tells her tale.

"The last two years have been an unbelievable experience for me," she said in a statement. "So to have it documented in pictures and to be able to tell people in my own words how it feels means a lot to me." Dean Freeman, who worked on David Beckham's autobiography, has been hired to take new photographs of the 23-year-old – of Lewis hunched over a typewriter perhaps, or thumbing through the Oxford English Dictionary.

"This will be the first time Leona tells her story of how the X Factor launched her from waitressing in Pizza Hut in Hackney to stardom on both sides of the Atlantic," raved Fenella Bates, Lewis's editor at Hodder & Stoughton. "It is a real-life fairytale and every girl's dream."