Shortly after Mezlekia's award win for ''Notes from the Hyena's Belly'', poet and editor
Anne Stone alleged that she had
ghostwritten all but the final 20 pages of the book. While Mezlekia acknowledged that as a non-native speaker of English he needed some assistance in ensuring that his ideas made it to the page in correct English, he responded that the book was fundamentally his own and that Stone's role in the book's publication was strictly that of a
copy editor, and sued Stone for
defamation. The resulting controversy led to considerable debate in the Canadian press, with most critics acknowledging that it can be extremely difficult to clearly determine how much of a role an editor can take in shaping a text before they should properly be credited as a coauthor. Several scholarly
theses on the nature and limits of the author/editor relationship have cited the Mezlekia case. ==References==