Such was the perceived low standard of the 62 books recently submitted for the 2018 Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, that the organisers withheld the award, saying that not a single title prompted the ‘unanimous, abundant laughter’ required. Like the lottery it rolls over to next year instead.
Thank goodness then for the return of Francis Plug, sociopathic stalker of literary celebrities and creation of London-based New Zealander Paul Ewen. Plug first appeared as the unhinged narrator of 2014’s How to Be a Public Author, which skewered both the absurdity of the public aspect of a writerly life and the publishing industry at large, and was inhabited by real-life authors, not all of them as charitable as Hilary Mantel who, getting into the spirit of things, generously blurbs: ‘One thinks of Goethe, one thinks of Shelley: one thinks of Plug.
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