Wraith Picket hoax

Interesting article concerning Australian Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White:

"Last year, some of Australia’s leading publishers and agents received a chapter of a novel in progress from a new and as yet unpublished writer, Wraith Picket. Some of them simply rejected the manuscript with the usual apologies. Others recognized a certain flair for language but found it confused, overwritten and in need of the sort of editing that no publisher these days could afford. The writer was less disappointed than he might otherwise have been because he was already, as his name might have suggested, in the grave. Wraith Picket was in fact an anagrammatic Patrick White, born in 1912 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973; the 'unpublishable' manuscript was Chapter Three of his novel The Eye of the Storm ..."
Times Online

This is reminiscent of the famous Ern Malley hoax, sort of in reverse. See also our page on hoaxes.

Tagged: australia, literature, hoax, hoaxes, australian+literature