'Don't buy the champagne': Booker prize winner targeted by phone hoax

Irish author John Banville received deceitful phone call telling him he had won the Nobel prize in literature

The Booker prize winning author John Banville had to tell his friends and family not to “buy the champagne”, after news he had won the Nobel prize in literature proved to be a hoax.

The Irish writer had been lying face down on his couch, mid-physiotherapy session, when he received a call from a man purporting to be Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, half an hour before the true winners would be revealed at a ceremony in Stockholm on Thursday.

Related: ‘Who wrote Mrs Osmond?’ – John Banville on writing a sequel to The Portrait of a Lady

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