Jason Arday claimed he survived 'unrecoverable' car accident, locked-in syndrome and testicular cancer in newly surfaced book proposal

By ELEANOR HARDING, EDUCATION EDITOR Published: 16:10, 7 August 2026 | Updated: 16:28, 7 August 2026 Professor Jason Arday claimed to have locked-in syndrome and testicular cancer in a book proposal for his memoir, it has emerged. The anecdotes appeared in a 2024 proposal for Great and Unfortunate Things, which is due to be published next week, but not in the final version. There are also other inconsistencies between the two versions of events in terms of dates and characters, US magazine The Atlantic reported. In the proposal, Professor Arday, 41, recounted being struck by a car as a teenager and spending several months in a coma – whereas in the memoir he described simply finishing school and taking his exams at that time. The proposal said he had locked-in syndrome during the coma, and witnessed doctors telling his parents that he would never recover and should be taken off life support 'as an act of mercy'. The proposal said: 'As I will describe to readers in the book, these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.' It added he awoke 'miraculously' from the coma, and spent a year 'relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.' The proposal also referred to a bout of testicular cancer, rather than the two brain tumours described in the final version of the memoir. Professor Jason Arday (pictured) claimed to have locked-in syndrome and testicular cancer in a book proposal for his memoir, it has emerged  The anecdotes appeared in a 2024 proposal for Great and Unfortunate Things, which is due to be published next week, but not in the final version (pictured: Professor Jason Arday) It comes after Cambridge launched an investigation following allegations of plagiarism by Professor Arday, who quit this week as Cambridge's youngest black professor over the 'personal cost' of the furore. His other surprising claims have included being unable to write until the age of 18, running 30 marathons in 35 days, and raising £5 million for charities. His book proposal, which surfaced this week, lays out many of the same events as his memoir but sometimes with slightly different dates and details. In an anecdote about a group of boys beating him up, they were four years older in the proposal than in the book. A suicide attempt was described in the proposal as happening before the pandemic – whereas in the memoir it happened during. In addition, the book proposal recounts how Professor Arday was given a prophecy in 2005 while working in Brazil by a 'shaman woman', who was 'an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people's futures.' The woman told him he would suffer in his life but also go on to do great things. The proposal said: 'Every event she described has since come to pass.' There are also other inconsistencies between the two versions of events in terms of dates and characters, US magazine The Atlantic reported. Pictured: Great And Unfortunate Things,  which is due for release on Tuesday In the final memoir, the anecdote is retained but instead it happens in 2006, and the woman is a local aid worker, described as 'a woman in her thirties with dark hair and eyes and a gentle, steady way about her'. Professor Arday, the son of Ghanaian immigrants, was appointed to Cambridge in 2023 after applying for a vacant professorship in the faculty of education. However, soon after, academics raised concerns with him and his bosses about plagiarism regarding his past work. When Times Higher Education magazine began investigating the academic's record, Professor Arday made a complaint to the police, resulting in officers calling the journalist involved. On Thursday, Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, admitted the force 'dropped the ball' when it spent four months investigating the journalist. Cambridge, Professor Arday and his publisher Simon & Schuster have been contacted for comment.