Art Bleeds into Life, with Jail Sentence

So remember the case of the Polish author who’d been arrested for murder based on the book he’d written? Now he’s been convicted of the crime:

Truth, it seems, really is stranger than fiction.

Novellist Krystian Bala was today jailed for 25 years for inspiring and

organising a murder that he had written about in a macabre best-selling

thriller.

A court in the Polish city of Wroclaw found the 33-year-old philosopher and

photographer guilty after an extraordinary trial that tested the boundaries

of fact and fiction and, for a while, forced the police and prosecutors to

become literary critics.

Bala is expected to appeal against the sentence.