Great Britain's prestigious National Poetry Competition prize, an annual £5,000 award for anonymous submissions of unpublished poems, went this year to "Horse under water," a poem in Jamaican dialect about using a dead horse as bait to fish for sharks:

hundreds of teeth iiiiiichin to bite me dead
an i liff de knife but it move slow
for everything cep dis killer move slow in the water
but fear drive my hand
an i slash him in de stomach

The three judges must have assumed they had discovered a fresh new voice from Britain's Caribbean community, perhaps another Linton Kwesi Johnson, but the person who turned up to claim the prize was a 62-year-old white woman named Caroline Carver, who said she began writing poetry as a hobby five years ago. The Plymouth Western Morning News described the crowd as "shocked." "I don't think they expected a white woman," Carver said. "However, everyone was far too polite to say so."

The same fascinating questions of authorship arose a few years ago, when an Australian novel focusing on aboriginal life turned out to have been written by a white woman, and when a British author pretended to be Irish to increase his chance of getting published as part of that trend. But perhaps the most memorable such hoax was The Education of Little Tree, an academically acclaimed memoir of a Native American orphan who grew up to confront immense racism and other obstacles. But as the New York Times uncovered in 1991, the real author was Asa Carter, who was not only a white man but a notorious racist Ku Klux Klan member who had penned George Wallace's infamous "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" speech and indeed had considered Wallace to be too liberal. Carter's fellow-segregationist brother, Doug, said Asa wrote Little Tree as form of "creative writing." Although Doug Carter said his brother maintained his racist beliefs to his deathbed, the University of New Mexico Press, which published the book, stood by its veracity. Lawrence Clayton, dean at Hardin-Simmons University, refused to accept that a racist was the author: "Carter created a fictitious life for himself and lived it. In years here, he became Little Tree. I think he just turned his back on his earlier life." Rennard Strickland of Southern Illinois University said Asa Carter's real identity is "a matter that doesn't concern or disturb me very much. The book seems to me to ring very true."

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