The Ern Malley Affair

'Dear Sir, When I was going through my bother’s things after his death, I found some poetry he had written. I am no judge of it myself…'
In 1943, Max Harris, editor of the literary journal Angry Penguins, received a letter containing a collection of poetry which he read with mounting excitement. As Harris recalled later: ‘…I was immediately impressed that here was a poet of tremendous power, working through a disciplined and restrained kind of statement into the deepest wells of human experience.’ Less than a year later his ‘great discovery’– not just the poems but even Ern Malley himself - was revealed to be ‘the literary hoax of the twentieth century’, perpetrated by poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart.
Michael Heyward’s brilliant, meticulously researched account of the scandal, THE ERN MALLEY AFFAIR, was published in 1993 to international acclaim and is proudly reissued in 2003 by Vintage.