As a writer I work dili­gently to come up with my own work and not bor­row from oth­ers. This appar­ently was not the case for the six­teen year old Ger­man author Helene Hege­mann who although hav­ing suc­cess­fully writ­ten a play and movie, thought it per­fectly okay to brazenly pla­gia­rize another author in her début novel Axolotl Road­kill stat­ing, “There’s no such thing as orig­i­nal­ity any­way, just authen­tic­ity.” Axolotl Road­kill is a novel about a six-teen year old Berlin girl explor­ing the city’s drug and club scene after her mother’s pass­ing.  The book has received crit­i­cal acclaim and is cur­rently a best seller in Ger­many and is a “final­ist for the $20,000 prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in the fic­tion cat­e­gory.” The book fair is well aware of her use of work from not only one source with out giv­ing credit-and appar­ently that doesn’t mat­ter. A fact, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Con­tinue read­ing Helene Hege­mann, Crit­i­cally Acclaimed Author, Six-teen, and A Plagiarizer