literary feud

The gloves are off as Derek Walcott viciously attacks fellow Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul in his recently premiered poem, Mongoose. The piece is “a fast-paced, savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul's work and personality that begins with the opening salvo: 'I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction.' Ouch! And it gets better.

Asne Seierstad became an overnight success with The Bookseller of Kabul, which claims to expose the brutal mistreatment of Afghan women by their husbands. Her thinly disguised real-life character has had his life ruined by the book and has written his own volume in an attempt to refute the lies told by Seierstad that have prompted his family to seek asylum overseas.