Literature

Guide to Literary Fraud

Katherine Dolan, The Observatory

Why do some authors pretend to be someone they are not? Why do they claim experiences that they don’t have? What drives them to create texts and claim that they are ancient? By examining some examples of literary fraud from the modern era, we can gain insight not only into a fraudulent writer’s perspective, but also into readers’ expectations, publishing practices, and what kind of story a culture values.
Samantha Sudol is a medievalist, writer, and editor.
Lucas Thompson is an academic specializing in contemporary U.S. and Anglophone literature, aesthetics, and film, publishing extensively on 20th-century fiction and ordinary language philosophy.
George Prochnik is an award-winning author and essayist whose work explores psychology, intellectual history, biography, and culture.
Ellen Feld is a writer, editor, and educator.
Birgitta Vaivai-Soderberg is a writer and editor.
Madeline VanArsdale is a linguist, writer, and editor.
John Dolan is the co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast. Dolan is an American poet, author, and essayist, and holds a PhD in rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. As a senior lecturer at the University of Otago, he taught several courses including composition and creative writing, and published the monograph ''Poetic Occasion From Milton to Wordsworth''.
Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and editor-in-chief of Belt Magazine.
Dobrota Pucherová is a researcher, author, and editor specializing in world literature.