In The Shadow Scholars, Patricia Kingori explores the global 'fake essay' industry. In doing so, she aims to tell the story of the approximately 40,000 so-called 'shadow scholars' in Kenya. Single mother Mercy, for example, writes all night to financially support her young daughter. Chege and Faith, husband and wife, use ghostwriting as a way to compensate for the fact that they can't affort the master's program they have been offered. Being born in Kenya, the youngest Black professor at Oxford University and herself affected by racist plagiarism, Patricia tries to map out this multi-billion dollar industry and uncover the intersecting social, economic and racial inequalities that underlie it. She investigates the meaning of academic integrity, the psychological consequences of performing invisible academic labour and threat of AI.