There is a terrible plagiarism story erupting, which will eventually appear in The Times and Writers' News. It has been sparked by a writer called Alex Keegan, who runs a site called Bootcamp (some may know him or have worked with him). He is a tough cookie - so he was horrified to find that someone had ripped off one of his long-ago published stories and was now selling it on Kindle. Stranger still, this person was an OU CREATIVE WRITING TUTOR, a person with a string of academic letters after her name. Further investigation found at least 13 pieces of work being offered on Kindle in her name that had been blatantly ripped off from other writers - including DYLAN THOMAS!
Much of the work from Amazon is now being taken down as she clearly tries to remove evidence. However, the OU have been informed and other writers have been up in arms. Some of the plagiarised work is fiction but there are also academic pieces there too.
The whole thing is clearly very strange and I am sure that a bigger story will emerge - there is more to this than fraud. If you wish to follow the tale, check out Alex's Twitter feed. If you are with OU on their writing course - please guard your work and always, always, be cautious about sharing work, particularly on the Internet. Sadly, plagiarism is rife and as writers we all know how much work is involved in our work.
If anyone has had experience of this woman, please PM me. I am not going to name her here but Alex has quite boldly done so. She really picked the wrong person to plagiarise - he is shouting it loudly! As so he should - it is so odd that the cliche 'stranger than fiction' really applies!