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An Italian arrested in the United States a year ago confessed to stealing more than 1,000 unpublished manuscripts. Many of these works were written by well-known authors, including Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Sally Rooney and the Dutch novelist Hanna Bervoets.
Philip B., 30, worked at Simon & Schuster, a London publishing house, but pretended to work for other publishing houses and duped writers and publishers into sending manuscripts, the prosecutors denounce in New York.
It hasn’t been revealed exactly which manuscripts are involved, but Margaret Atwood, for example, claimed in 2019 that there was a “conspiracy to steal the manuscript” of her book The TestamentsThe sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. In Hanna Bervoets case, it was the 2021 Book Week Gift, What we have seen. An unsuspecting employee of his publishing company sent the manuscript to the fraudster.
160 internet domains
B. used his knowledge of the publishing world to set up a fraudulent scheme to get writers, other publishing house employees, and literary award jurors to submit manuscripts. Before that, between 2016 and 2022, he used hundreds of names of real people in the publishing world and more than 160 internet domains that closely resembled the domain names of agencies and publishers.
The Italian was arrested in January 2022 at JFK airport in New York. His motive is not yet clear. He didn’t sell the manuscripts. Furthermore, they were not leaked or a “ransom” demanded.
B. confessed to being guilty of online fraud. He will be sentenced in April. He could face up to 20 years in prison.
There is no reason to believe that the London publishing house where he worked was involved in the scam: Simon & Schuster was not named by the US judiciary. The publisher said last year he was “shocked and horrified” to learn of the story.
