The owner of the hand that signed the paper apparently did not use her own name and identity. Helen “”Demidenko”, the 24-year-old winner of the Miles Franklin award with her first novel The Hand that Signed the Paper is not the daughter of an illiterate migrant Ukrainian taxi driver telling a a story about her father’s wartime experience. She is Helen Darville, daughter of English migrants, who used the Ukrainian name, according to her brother, to protect her family and to make the story of the book “”seem more real”.
The former is an acceptable reason for taking a nom de plume. The latter is a deception. That deception has been compounded in subsequent interviews when Demidenko has presented as fact various lies about her family.
One might argue that the fact the author is not of Ukrainian stock and did not hear as a child the family history she related in the book puts the award-winning book at a higher creative and imaginative level: it was pure fiction not semi-reportage. But that would only be the case if one presumed that the awards had been given on the quality of the words alone, irrespective of the ethnicity, age or sex of the author.
The test for The Hand that Signed the Paper, however, will not be whether the author tells a few fibs and what critics and commentators say over the next few weeks. Rather it will be the universal test for literature: time. Will it continue to tell truths about ourselves nature years hence?