Serbia: Hackers fake Nobel literature prize win for prominent author

Belgrade, 6 Oct. (AKI) - Serbian media were bombarded on Thursday with a statement that prominent writer Dobrica Cosic had been awarded 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The e-mail message was purportedly sent by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. But the Academy denied the statement came from its e-mail address and said it had no knowledge of the message.

The email cited the website http://www.nobelprizeliterature.org which took users to a mock-up of the official Nobel Prize website with the announcement of Cosic's win.

The hackers on the fake Nobel site pasted Cosic's picture over Italian poet and Nobel laureate for literature Dario Fo with quotes from Cosic’s novel Divisions.

The message confused media, as Cosic wasn’t an official candidate for this year’s literature prize, which the Nobel committee announced on Thursday it had awarded to Sweden's most famous living poet, Tomas Transtroemer.

The prank occurred 50 years after the first Yugoslav writer, Ivo Andric won the Nobel prize.

A group calling itself a “non-profit self-organised group of web activists” later removed Cosic from the fake Nobel Prize website.

“The purpose of our activity is to bring to the attention of the Serbian public the dangerous influence of the writer Dobrica Cosic,” it said.

“Terrible consequences of decades of Cosic's political, literary and public activity are felt to this day, both by his own country and throughout the region.

Dobrica Cosic is not a recipient of the Nobel Prize, although the general public in Serbia and he himself believed he was for 15 full minutes,” said athe hackers.

“We find some solace in that fact,” the hackers concluded.

The Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences said the whole affair was being reported to police

“This is just another in a string of attacks on important institutions in Serbia to mock social values in our country,” the Academy said in a statement.

Cosic, aged 90, is the most prominent Serbian writer and was a leading dissident during the Communist era. He became known as “father of the nation” owing to his nationalist views.