It would never have happened had Mezlekia's book not won the 1999 Governor General's prize for non-fiction. Soon after the acclaim, Anne Stone, a writer in Vancouver, pops up and says that, except for the last 20 pages, she wrote Mezlekia's book. This bodes well for CanLit. Until the feud erupted, I had never heard of Mezlekia's Notes from the Hyena's Belly or Stone's own modest novel Hush . Now I'll look for them in my neighbourhood bookstore, which is the wonderful thing about literary feuds.
Nothing sells like pure venom.
She served beyond the call of duty, however, doing the paperwork that won Mezlekia a Canada Council grant. But I doubt I'd make the fuss about it that Stone has. I've ghostwritten five books, four of which were published, one of them winning a major award. This sounds like what Anne Stone did for Nega Mezlekia. This has become more important now that we have a Public Lending Right Commission, which pays authors based on how many times the book shows up in public libraries.