A cache of documents originally held by the Kansas Bureau of Investigations (KBI) suggest that the author, who was acclaimed for pioneering the non-fiction novel and a new genre of long-form journalism, may have massaged the facts in at least two chapters, possibly to cast the lead investigator, Alvin Dewey, in a better light.
His approach to the new Freud is consistent with his ideas about psychoanalysis, which he considers a genre of literature, a form of persuasion closer to poetry than medicine.
The prize, sponsored by the Folio Society, was created last year with the aim of celebrating the year's best English-language fiction, regardless of form, genre and geography.
The Folio prize aims to recognise the best English-language fiction – regardless of form, genre and geography, and was won in its first year by the American short-story writer George Saunders.
One crucial difference is that the latter restricts itself to Commonwealth writers whereas the new award, founded by literary agent Andrew Kidd and sponsored by the Folio Society, will be open to writers regardless of form, genre or where they are from.
Coupled with the fact that the Booker then excluded American writers – that changes this year – there was a strong feeling that there was a gap in the prize landscape: that a prize to reward literary achievement regardless of form, genre or the author's country of origin was needed.
He described the genre as "a form of democratizing, internationalizing, speaking a new language, a Heideggerian form of passing along fundamental messages".
The so-called biblio-memoir was a feature of 2014 and February will bring a new addition to the genre in the form of Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer, in which Ann Morgan embarks on a quest to read a book from every country (Harvill Secker, February).
Hamid's Exit West is a novel of migrants and refugees that slips the confines of particular reality by constantly crossing and recrossing the borders of genre and form.
These are different genres separated by walls of form, which separate, for example, a novel from a memoir.
The modern Scandinavian crime novel was all but invented in the nineteen-sixties, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Swedish partners who borrowed realist elements of the nineteenth-century novel and made the crime genre into a form of social criticism.
