I mean, if it was just a mistake, why not born in Sweden, Born in France etc. etc.
I don't know if it was a mistake or not or where he was born, but mistakes usually have some connection to something else immediately present in front of you.
If you see "born in Hawaii ... father from Kenya" you might make the mistake of writing "born in Kenya" or "father from Hawaii." Wouldn't that be the commonest kind of mistake?
If you had a friend travelling to Sweden or France, you might accidentally plug those in to what you're writing, but aren't such mistakes less common?
You make the mistake and quickly look over what you've written. If you wrote "Kenya" and see "Kenya" somewhere on the page, you figure you're okay. If you wrote "Sweden" and don't see in in what you've been given, you read it more carefully to see if you got it wrong.
I'm not saying that's what actually happened, but c'mon ...
21 years and you remember exactly what you wrote, what you thought and why you wrote what you did, for a bio of a then unknown Barack Obama.
Yea. Right.
That's what doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that was what she was told and that was what was written.
Authors write their own bios, and after it’s printed they are asked to review it for accuracy. This is specifically true of the literary agency in question and of the industry as a whole.
Reply to 23
Think about what it took to print something back in 91. Computers weren’t widely used in offices for regular typing. That pamphlet had to be gone over a hundred times before it went to the print shop.
Close family member of mine is an editor and began her career as a Research Editor for a major international magazine. The protocol for verification of information in this magazine was extremely stringent. Authors were required to verify every detail once the copy was ready. Even today as an independent editor of biographies and other books, my relative has to follow very stringent protocols in confirming information for accuracy. A birth place published incorrectly would have been immediately noticed and the unfortunate editor or research editor would likely be out of a job and out of a career.