Melville House Books

Harry Nicolaides, aka Arjarn Harry: Does this make you want to buy his book?

Australian writer Harry Nicolaides has been released from a Bankok prison, where he’d been serving a sentence for violating the country’s lese-majeste laws when he insulted the Thai royal family in his novel, Verisimilitude (as previously reported on MobyLives). He was sentenced to be in the Thai big house for three years, but as this BBC News story reports he was pardoned by the, er, monarch he insulted.

Now, however, a former colleague of Nicolaides’ is saying it was all a stunt to promote Nicolaides’ writing career. In this Sydney Morning Herald story, Heath Dollar says he taught at a Thai university with Nicolaides, whom he knew as Ajarn Harry, and they talked about their mutual interest in writing a lot. He says that Nicolaides showed him an early draft of Verisimilitude, including “a particular passage which, as I recall, insulted the crown prince of Thailand. He asked if I thought the passage violated Thai law,” and later “rather cavalierly suggested that going to prison for lese majeste could bring him literary fame.” Says Dollar, “Though he is sometimes portrayed as a dissident, Nicolaides would more accurately be described as an opportunist. And if he is a martyr, he is not a champion of free speech but a martyr on the cross of ambition.”

Kindly publication that it is, the SMH gave Nicolaides a separate article to respond, and he says, well, it is the sort of thing he’d do, except he didn’t do it this time. So why would Dollar make that up? “Nicolaides speculated the aspiring author was trying to drum up publicity to further his own writing career.”

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