Plagiarism

Dear Indigna,

Did you read (Reuters, March 28) about that “10-year-old winner of a children's poetry competition [who] had to hand back her prize money after newspaper readers noticed that her poem was the work of a well known writer”? Apparently, “she did not realize it had been written by someone else.” Can you believe this?

Stunned and Appalled
Homer, AK

Dear Stunned,

Indeed I can. In fact, the same exact thing happened to me! I submitted a manuscript to my publisher, only to find out that it had already been published under the name “Finnegan’s Wake” some decades earlier. What are the odds?