On Sunday, December 7, 2014 10:07:35 AM UTC-8, graham wrote:
> Back in the ~60s (I think) a British ex-con won a literary prize for a
> novel. It was subsequently found that he had copied an American novel
> word for word. When I read it, I thought that the jury must have been
> blind to the setting and abundance of Americanisms in it.
> Graham

This was the closest thing Google came up with:

This January, convicted murderer Alaric Hunt received $10,000 prize from the Private Eye Writers of America for his novel Cuts Through Bone.