Melville House Books

Jan Cempírek with a copy of "The White Horse, the Yellow Dragon"

A story at the Literary Saloon calls our attention to a literary scandal in the Czech Republic involving Vietnamese teenager Lan Pham Thi, who won a prestigious prize for a novel called Bílej kůň, žlutej drak (The White Horse, the Yellow Dragon). The book described the difficult life of the Vietnamese minority in the Czech Republic and caused quite a sensation … except now it turns out there is no Lan Pham Thi and the book was a fraud.

As a report in the Prague Daily Monitor reveals, the real author was a Czech author named Jan Cempírek, who “made a few e-mail interviews on Lan’s behalf and sent her fake photos and a video recording” to the press and officials who awarded her the Book Club Prize — including messages to the Prize officials supposedly from Lan saying she was studying in Malaysia and couldn’t attend the award ceremonies. But as another report, at Vietnamnet, details, people became suspicious “when Lan refused to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Prague to receive the prize in early September, even though the publisher of the book offered to cover the airfare.”

It didn’t stop there: “The Czech Ambassador to Malaysia invited the young talented writer to his embassy in Kuala Lumpur but she sent her regrets, saying that she had returned to the Czech Republic already.” Then some journalist became interested:

They went to the offices of the Vietnamese Association of the Czech Republic and schools where Lan said she had studied but they didn’t find any trace of the mysterious writer. Even at the Passport Agency, they couldn’t find Lan.  Howver, someone discovered that the IP of the computer where Lan’s emails were delivered, is not in Kuala Lumpur but in Prague. They targeted a Czech writer whose writing style, say local critics, is similar to style of the winning manuscript. That writer is Jan Cempírek.

An interview with Cempírek at Respekt, Cempírek claims he did it because “I wanted to test a few things. First, how would the publishing houses, the literary class with its critics and the snobs react to a book by a Czech Vietnamese girl? And then how would it be received by the Czech public and the Vietnamese community itself?”

Meanwhile, people from Czech Vietnamese community interview for the Prague Daily Monitor report say they are “embarrassed to hear that the novel is a mystification.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.