A Statement by Spelt Magazine on Plagiarism by Ojo Taiye

When you take away from others, you weaken the platform for everyone

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

This is not what we had planned for our first post on substack. However, we feel it is important to make a stand here, and to go forwards with intent.

If you don’t know who we are, hello, we are Spelt magazine, a full colour print magazine that seeks to validate and celebrate the rural experience. Each year we run a single poem competition. This has been held up this year by proven plagiarism by a previous winner. Here is the statement in full by myself

Wendy Pratt

and Spelt competition judge, poet and author Polly Atkin.

The full statement can be read on our website.

A Statement by Spelt Magazine on Plagiarism by Ojo Taiye

It recently came to our attention that poet Ojo Taiye, who we awarded second place in the Spelt Single Poetry competition 2022, was found to be a serial plagiarist. Spelt is a magazine founded on values of fairness, and integrity, authenticity and equality. Our main priority has always been to provide a platform for writers to express their connection to the natural world, especially those writers coming from under represented backgrounds. As the founder of Spelt it hurts me, personally, to know that we have platformed a writer who has built their reputation on the backs of other writer’s hard work.

So much work goes into the magazine, by editors who are also writers, by competition judges who are also writers. It is so disappointing to find that a writer may have abused that hard work. When you take away from others, you weaken the platform for everyone.

I am sorry to those people who missed out on the opportunity to place in our competition, who have been diligent and careful and agonised over every line, wondering if they were good enough.

We will continue to do our best to provide a platform that encourages and supports writers.

Wendy Pratt

Founder and Editor in Chief, Spelt Magazine

I’m extremely grateful to Polly Atkin for bringing this to our attention, for her careful thoughts and time taken over what is a complex and difficult situation. Her statement below:

Statement by Polly Atkin on poetry plagiarism and creative integrity

This is a statement I would have hoped I would never have to write. As poets, as readers, as editors and mentors and judges we take the work presented to us on face value. We trust that it is what it appears to be. It deeply saddens me on so many levels to have learnt earlier this month that Taiye Ojo, whose submission I awarded second place in the Spelt Poetry Prize 2022, is a persistent plagiarist of other people’s poetry. Like other poetry plagiarists, he has repeatedly taken work known in one arena, collaged it or loosely reformed it, and submitted it as original work under his own name to magazines and competitions. It is a familiar cynical pattern to those of us who remember the plagiarism cases that were revealed in the UK a decade ago. I remember them, and the harm they caused, both to the poets whose work and personal narratives they appropriated and exploited, and to trust in poetry more widely. 

I cannot be certain that the poem that kept rising out of the mass of other great poems submitted to the Spelt Poetry Prize in 2022 is the work of the person who put their name to it, who has profited from the power of the images and the distinctive phrasing that stuck with me, that pushed other poems out of the winning three. Because I cannot be certain the poem is the poem it claims to be, its author the person who has named themselves, I am forced into a position of assuming the reverse: that the poem is not the work of the person who submitted it, and who was named as a second prize winner. The prize is being rescinded not because we have proven the poem is plagiarised, but because we cannot trust that it is not. This is not a position anyone wants to be in. 

In the words of the editors of Axis, it is vital to ‘foster […] an environment where artists’ rights and concerns are taken seriously’. I want also to echo the words of The Seventh Wave, who foregrounded the importance of ‘trust, integrity, and transparency’ when they removed Taiye Ojo’s poems from their website in March this year, writing: ‘as a literary nonprofit with limited resources, we place great value on every contributor seat we’re able to offer, so we do not take this action lightly.’ 

Because I chose this poem over other poems, another writer who would never dream of plagiarising someone else’s work missed out on a prize placement. This is not okay. I also contributed unknowingly to enabling this writer to continue to appropriate other poets’ work whilst making a name for themselves internationally. Every time a plagiarist benefits from stolen work it supports and justifies their practice and allows them to continue. 

It troubles me deeply that I cannot trust the authorship of this poem, and that other readers, editors and prize judges are placed in this position by repeat plagiarists. In the straitened circumstances art organisations and literary magazines exist in no one has the resources to expend time and energy checking submissions are what they claim to be. 

If you do recognise your own writing in the poem I gave a prize to, please know how much I value that writing. I am sorry my ignorance has contributed to ongoing exploitation, directly or indirectly. 

Plagiarists let us all down. They let individuals down, and they let the artform down. I want to trust poets. I want to believe poets are acting ethically. That they write for love of the artform. That they care about it like I do. That they know the difference between intertextuality, creative conversation, and plagiarism. We need to be able to trust each other, both to be acting with integrity in our own creative lives, and to be supporting a culture that does not reward exploitative practices. Like most of us, I still hope, I try to do both. I expect the same of others.

Polly Atkin, poet and author

2022 judge of the Spelt Poetry Competition