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Today in publishing and literature: Booker Prize winner Ben Okri is fighting with a former editor who claims to have rewritten portions of his work, a Brussels court rules Tintin in the Congo is not racist, and buying Amanda Knox's memoir is not without risk.
Nigerian author Ben Okri, who won the Booker prize in 1991 for his novel The Famished Road, is hopping mad at his former editor Robin Robertson, who told The Telegraph in an interview he once had to "rewrite a book of Ben Okri’s written in Lagos patois." The book in question is Okri's 1988 short story collection Stars of the New Curfew. Okri sent a letter to the paper announcing he was "disappointed" with the claim, and accusing Robertson -- who is from Scotland -- of trying to "exaggerate his own importance." Robertson, for his part, says he doesn't understand why Okri is getting "overwrought" at the suggestion he punched up the text. [The Guardian]
The rights to Amanda Knox's memoir will be auctioned off this week, four months after an Italian appeals court overturned her murder conviction in the death of Meredith Kercher, her study abroad roommate. A publishing executive meeting with Knox says "Everybody fell in love with her," but there's still uncertainty in the trade about whether the American book-buying public is apt to feel the same way. This becomes especially problematic when you consider that the expectation is Knox will pull down a seven-figure advance for the memoir, and other books about her case have had less-than-stellar sales. [The New York Times]