Authors Electric

My exhibition at Newcastle Central Library, Part the First.  Not another double entendre from me, you cry! To which I reply, I insist on getting it out as often as possible with as many different people as possible. Yes, getting our work out there, it's the perennial question to which there are many answers, all of them sadly requiring time away from writing, watching NCIS and messing about online. I’ve just returned from overseeing the installation of one such, ‘Will Power’, a solo exhibition opening today, which I was offered by the central library in my nearest city, of my poems inspired by Shakespeare. Exhibition Part Two: My 'Ophelia's Sista' Hamlet rap, some of my play posters, and Will S. I’m better known for death, sex and pathology poetry lately but occasionally I’ve bashed out a sonnet, sometimes based on one of Will’s but on a modern subject. As I’ve found with my science-poetry art installations, from very untechie (beachballs, sheep, swimming pool...

'What's yours is mine, bwahahaha!' I’ve been embroiled in a plagiarism scandal for weeks now and it’s still going on. Someone I’ve known for years, been to their launches, bought their books, has plagiarised friends and colleagues as well as famous writers, and it’s been going on for years under our very noses. At first mainly poetry, now as more and more of it emerges, it includes prose as well and cheating on a PhD thesis, and getting huge amounts of funding from various public bodies on the basis of track record as a writer. I got embroiled when two friends, co-publishees (and as they discovered after a book launch, plag’d poets) and our mutual publisher failed to get any satisfaction over several weeks of private back and forth. I started looking at other poems in the new book and discovered to my dismay that many of them were others’ poems with tweaks and synonyms inserted. We then brought in the ‘poetry sleuth’ Dr Ira Lightman, who’s also a friend, and who has ...