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Poet, playwright, short story writer, translator, and autobiographer James Kirkup (1918–2009) wrote under several pseudonyms in addition to his own name. The Wikipedia page for Kirkup lists "James Falconer, Aditya Jha, Jun Honda, Andrew James, Taeko Kawai, Felix Liston, Edward Raeburn, and Ivy B. Summerforest" as being among those pseudonyms. As far as I can tell, this list of pseudonyms was included at the time of the page's creation, though I could be reading the page history wrong. The citation given in Wikipedia for the list is to the James Kirkup papers in the Yale archives.

Yet the linked page at Yale describing the archive does not itself list Aditya Jha among Kirkup's pseudonyms. Instead, the "Additional Description" section includes this sentence: "Kirkup occasionally used pen names, including James Falconer, Jun Honda, Andrew James, Taeko Kawai, Felix Liston, Edward Raeburn, and Ivy B. Summerforest." The exact same list, except with no Aditya Jha. Nor does searching that archive for Aditya Jha yield any hits. By contrast, searching for the other names does bring up results associated with Kirkup.

The name Aditya Jha is also positioned oddly within the list of Kirkup's pseudonyms on the Wikipedia page: it is the only one out alphabetical order by last name. A Google search for "James Kirkup Aditya Jha" brings up several pages that repeat the list of pseudonyms in the same order as Wikipedia's, indicating that the ur-source for this claim is Wikipedia.

So: Did James Kirkup actually use the pen name Aditya Jha? If so, what works did he write using that name — poems, translations, essays, or something else? If not, it's probably futile to try to account for that name's appearance on his Wikipedia page, but editing the page might be the next step.

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Looks like you've stumbled across a case of Wikipedia vandalism that's gone unnoticed for years.

You say "it's probably futile to try to account for that name's appearance on his Wikipedia page", but I think doing so already provides pretty strong evidence that the information is false. I had a look through that Wikipedia page's edit history and found the following interesting revisions:

To summarise the info in all those links:

  • On 26 October 2019, someone added "Krishay Kansal" to the list of Kirkup's pseudonyms. The IP address that did this has now been banned from editing Wikipedia.
  • On 26 November 2019, a user called "Aditya jha5" added "Aditya Jha" to the list of Kirkup's pseudonyms. That edit was quickly reverted (by someone who does a lot of Wikipedia editing and had previously reverted vandalising edits on the same page) as "Probable self-promotion".
  • On 10 January 2020, someone on an IP address in India removed "Krishay Kansal" and added "Aditya Jha", leading to the current state of affairs in the pseudonym list.

We could spend ages hunting down all of Kirkup's writings and all information about all pseudonyms of his, but given all of the above information, the obvious explanation is that a random internet troll called Aditya Jha added their own name to this Wikipedia page, the change having been reverted in 2019 but then gone unnoticed in 2020, perhaps because the second Aditya Jha addition also undid a previous vandalising edit adding another irrelevant name to the same Wikipedia page.

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  • thanks Randolph! I edited the Wikipedia page to remove the spurious pseudonym (spurionym?) Commented 52 mins ago

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