A BRIEF kerfuffle in Balkan and literary circles today: the venerable Serbian novelist, Dobrica Cosic was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Well, that is what it said here. But, hang on, no he wasn't. It has been given to Tomas Transtromer, from Sweden. What is up? Someone went to the time and effort to fake a page which was then linked to the rest of the real Nobel website. Mr Cosic's victory was then announced on the fake page.

The fake page has the url nobelprizeliterature.org and the real Nobel website is nobelprize.org. The fake domain has been registered to one “Gjord Halvorsen” and an Oslo address and phone number, which does not work, is given. The name, which is rather unusual, is perhaps an alias. No sign of a person of that name can be found with a casual google search. An email to the address given has brought no response.

Within an hour of the fake, which was reported by some Serbian media before a humiliating climbdown, a tweet in the name of Mr Cosic, @DobricaCosic appeared announcing “It is the truth”. It was retweeted by @VookJeremic, who, as his name suggests is someone who likes to make fun of Vuk Jeremic, the Serbian foreign minister. The circumstantial evidence points to a clever hoax.

If Mr Cosic had indeed won the fallout would have been positively nuclear. Mr Cosic, who was born in 1921 and fought as partisan during the second world war. He became a famous novelist, and was nominated for the prize by a Serbian group. However, he is better known as the intellectual godfather of the Serbian nationalism which played such a decisive role, not just in the destruction of Yugoslavia but in the military drive to create a greater Serbia from its ashes. In 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, he briefly served as president of the rump Yugoslavia of Serbia and Montenegro under the effective control of Slobodan Milosevic, the then Serbian leader.

Mr Cosic's name is linked to the infamous leaked draft memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts of whose 1986 publication is widely regarded as one of the key moments in the history of the end of Yugoslavia. In 1984 Mr Cosic became a leading light in the Committee for Freedom of Speech which was formed to protect dissidents. By a twist of fate they included several of the men who would later feature as key figures in the drama of the war years incljuding Franjo Tudjman, who was to become president of Croatia, Alija Izetbegovic who became president of Bosnia and Vojislav Seselj of Serbia who is now on trial for war crimes in The Hague.