Fiona already has a doppelgänger - writer Fiona Shaw, so I suppose writer Jeanette Winterson shouldn't mind too much about hers - except that Tracey Emin warns me I will have to give my fingerprints to the police to prove that I am not smuggling illegal guinea pigs into Britain or running a brothel round the back of Spitalfields market or whatever the other JW is up to.
In school we learn to quote supposed "authorities" – writers who lend support to our case not simply because of the veracity of their findings or the eloquence they lend to our words but also because they have some kind of recognised standing which we hope to add to our own.
"The task of passing, especially in our great cities, is not so difficult as is supposed," a writer going by the name Heba Jannath wrote, in an essay titled "America's Changing Color Line," in 1934.
Jesse Belvin and supposed co-writer Johnny Green sued the group the same week for not receiving credit for writing the song.
But then I suppose crime writers might also feel marginalised.
I am private, sort of shy (as I suppose all writers are), and value my privacy.
I suppose the writers had so much more time to develop characters without all the gratuitous sex and nudity they were even able to give the dragons proper personalities.
The correct response to such criticism is: "Who gives a shit?" Writers are supposed to borrow from other writers, have always borrowed from other writers, and always will borrow from other writers.
Most American novelists, with this amount of information to impart, would be unable to resist flourishing the labor of their research: we are all supposed to revere writers who know things about the world (seventies funk! Big Coal!), notwithstanding the non-mysterious and equalizing interventions of Google.
But with the demise of apartheid, Gordimer once more showed her strength, challenging the supposed anxiety for writers in her country that they now lacked a subject, with The House Gun (1997) and her award-winning 2001 novel The Pickup, which exposed the new issues of migration, corruption, and continuing alienation.
