Alastair Reid (22 March 1926, in Whithorn – 21 September 2014, in Manhattan) was a Scottish poet and a scholar of South American literature.
[1] In 1984, in an interview for The Wall Street Journal, Reid admitted fabricating many details of his reporting from Spain for the New Yorker, including inventing places and ascribing statements to composite characters.
"[2] In his book, Whereabouts, Reid counters this article with the following: These pieces were at the center of a curious storm that blew up in the American press during June of 1984.
A year or so before, I had addressed a seminar at Yale University on the wavering line between fact and fiction, using examples from various writers, Borges among them, and from my own work.
A number of columnists reproved me for writing about an "imaginary" Spanish village, a charge that would have delighted the flesh-and-blood inhabitants.... Not a single one of my critics, as far as I could judge, had gone back to read the pieces in question.