The Literary Scandal That Rocked The Czech Republic

A hard-hitting book that deals with racial discrimination, "White Horse, Gold Dragon", has caused a stir in the Czech Republic because its author does not exist. An excerpt:

The story began when a 19-year-old Vietnamese girl who is living in the Czech Republic won a prestigious literary prize for her novel, “White Horse, Gold Dragon”, which was still in manuscript. That was electrifying news for the community of Vietnamese in Europe, and was widely reported in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Sadly, Pham Thi Lan is not the author of that book.

Czech journalists had doubted that she was the author of the above book and they made great efforts to find out the truth.

The first to express doubts was a reporter for the Pravo newspaper, Zdenko Pavelka. Pavelka argued this book couldn’t possibly be written by a 19-year-old girl. Since then they started searching for ‘Pham Thi Lan.’

However, Lan never met any reporters in the Czech Republic. She communicated through emails, reasoning that she was studying at the University of Malaysia.

Based on information that Lan provided via email and on her blog, as well the website iDnes.cz, newspaper researchers determined that there was no girl named Lan who was born in 1990 in Sokolov, no Pham Thi Lan who studied at the Pisek high school, and no Vietnamese family with a daughter named Pham Thi Lan in the town of Frantiskoe Lazne, as Lan wrote in her email or blog.

Meanwhile, the book was selling well in the Czech Republic. Readers were attracted by its criticism of current Czech society – particularly racial discrimination – and it partly unveils the life of the 70 thousand-member Vietnamese emigrant community in that country.