When I left Jason Arday last week, he was humiliated but alive. The 41-year-old black fabulist—the “youngest-ever black professor” at the University of Cambridge—was facing a mounting tsunami of damaging revelations. There was his plagiarism, first of all. Simon & Schuster was just about to publish his book, Great and Unfortunate Things. It did so, to considerable fanfare, on Aug. 11. The book was an “Editor’s Pick” on Amazon, which placed it among the “Best Biographies & Memories.”
I say “his” book, but it was only incidentally his. A “book doctor” called Eve Claxton was listed as co-author, and it soon emerged that another co-author was that prodigious scribe, AI. More digging revealed that Arday’s dissertation was lifted largely from a 2009 PhD thesis by a Brunel University student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers.
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