Characters and the law

Think carefully before using the names of real people in your work. The rules about libel vary between countries, but essentially you could be at risk of being sued for defamation if you write fiction that uses someone’s real name. It is, rather surprisingly, possible to be sued even if you change a person’s name. If that person is still recognisable from their dialogue, physical description, actions and context, and if it can be shown that what you’ve written may have harmed their reputation or business interests, then watch out.

I faced such a conundrum in a novel I was writing (The Sphinx Scrolls): an earlier draft of the book featured a character based on a well-known government official in Egypt, the head of antiquities. He wasn’t exactly an A-list celebrity, but within the archaeological world everyone knew his name. So I changed his name, but I realised that it was still obviously based on him because my character had the same attitudes and did the same job. So then I thought some more about it and decided to change the sex of my character to a female, and instead of conflict arising from the (relatively) well-known attitudes of the real head of Egyptian antiquities I hit upon the idea of my female character having been at university with the novel’s heroine, and they had hated each other ever since. Having resolved this problem to my satisfaction, and to that of any Egyptian lawyers who might have studied the text, it then turned out that I had to say goodbye to this character anyway because I changed the ending of the book. But it was a useful exercise in solving the problem of the recognisability of real people in fiction.

In my later novel, The Chaplin Conspiracy, I used a real person as a character in the story (the drummer and grail hunter Rat Scabies), but I only did so after gaining written permission to do so.