Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a Swiss-Scottish writer and journalist.[2] Hari has written for publications including The Independent and The Huffington Post and has written books on the topics of depression, the war on drugs, and the monarchy. He has also given a TED talk on the topic of addiction.[3]

In 2011 Hari resigned as a columnist at The Independent after being accused of plagiarism, and of making pejorative edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct.[4]


Contents
1	Early life
2	Early career
3	Plagiarism
4	Wikipedia edits
5	Later career
6	Awards
7	Books
8	See also
9	References
10	External links
Early life
Hari was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a Scottish mother and Swiss father,[5] before his family relocated to London when he was an infant.[6] Hari was physically abused in his childhood while his father was away and his mother was ill.[7]

According to Hari, he attended the John Lyon School, an independent school affiliated with Harrow School, and then Woodhouse College, a state sixth-form in Finchley.[8] Hari graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 2001 with a double first in social and political sciences.[9]

Early career
In 2000 he was joint winner of The Times Student News Journalist of the Year award for his work on the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity. After university he joined the New Statesman, where he worked between 2001 and 2003, and then wrote two columns a week for The Independent. At the 2003 Press Gazette Awards, he won Young Journalist of the Year.[10] A play by Hari, Going Down in History, was performed at the Garage Theatre in Edinburgh, and his book God Save the Queen? was published by Icon Books in 2002.[10]

In addition to being a columnist for The Independent, Hari's work has also appeared in The Huffington Post, New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, El Pais, The Sydney Morning Herald and Ha'aretz, and he has reported from locations around the world such as Congo and Venezuela.[11] He appeared regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme The Review Show, and was a book critic for Slate. In 2009 he was named by The Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain.[12]

Plagiarism
In 2011, Hari was the subject of two scandals involving his conduct as a journalist. First, he was accused of plagiarism by including in his articles quotes that his interviewees had previously given to other journalists, as if they were the product of his own interviewing. Subsequently, he was found to have anonymously edited the Wikipedia pages of a number of critics of his work so as to present them in a negative light. These behaviours resulted in significant damage to Hari's reputation, and he was asked to return the 2008 Orwell Prize. He was suspended and then resigned as a columnist for The Independent.

Accusations of plagiarism were initially made by bloggers at Deterritorial Support Group and Brian Whelan, editor of Yahoo! Ireland, who asserted that some of Hari's interviews contained material published in previous interviews and written works by his interview subjects.[13][14][15] For example, a 2009 interview with Afghan women's rights activist Malalai Joya included quotations from her book Raising my Voice in a manner that made them appear as if spoken directly to Hari.[16] Hari initially denied wrongdoing, stating that the unattributed quotes were for clarification and did not involve passing off someone else's thoughts as his own,[17] [18] but would later say that his behaviour has been "completely wrong" and that "when I interviewed people I often presented things that had been said to other journalists or had been written in books as if they had been said to me, which was not truthful."[19] As a consequence, Hari was suspended for two months from The Independent,[20][4] and shortly afterwards resigned from this role. The Media Standards Trust instructed the Council of the Orwell Prize to examine the allegations, [21] [22] which resulted in Hari returning the 2008 Orwell Prize [23]

Hari did not return the prize money of £2000.[24] Hari later offered to repay the sum, but Political Quarterly, responsible for paying the prize money in 2008, instead invited him to make a donation to English PEN, of which George Orwell had been a member. Hari arranged with English PEN to make a donation equal to the value of the prize, to be paid in installments once he returned to work at The Independent.[25] However, he did not return to work there.