Australian author John Hughes has been found by literary academics to have plagiarised passages from classic novels, including The Great Gatsby and Anna Karenina, for his most recent novel, The Dogs.
John Hughes released his latest novel, The Dogs, in September 2021. Not long after this, the book was longlisted for the Miles Franklin prize, accompanied by extensive praise.
However, on Thursday the 9th of June, The Guardian confronted Hughes about his book bearing extremely similar passages to the 2017 English translation of Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s book The Unwomanly Face of War. Hughes publicly apologized to Alexievich and her translators, saying that he did this “without realizing it”.
This is not where the matter ends. On Wednesday the 15th of June, The Guardian further reported Hughes having lifted entire passages, albeit very lightly altered, from the novels The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, and All Quiet on the Western Front. Whole sentences had been copied, with often only a single word diverging from the original.
This time, Hughes responded to allegations saying that these similarities were intentional. He argued that authors have been recycling, rewriting, and basing their own work upon other artists’ writing for as long as we can remember: “I don’t think I’m a plagiarist more than any other writer who has been influenced by the greats who have come before them.”
The author has now confronted us with two very different claims: did Hughes make an inadvertent, regrettable mistake, or was it in fact a purposeful act towards furthering modern literature?
In defending himself, Hughes argues that TS Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, being an anthology of “the great words of others”, makes Eliot a plagiarist himself. False, claims Tom Doig, creative writing professor at the University of Queensland – because Eliot included footnotes.
Of course, degrees of plagiarism vary. It is true that artists build on work that has come before theirs all the time. However, there is a difference between being inspired by, or basing your own original creation on others’ work, and copying another artist word for word.
This opinion is apparently shared with the Miles Franklin trustees, who removed The Dogs from the award’s longlist on Friday the 10th of June.
Still, for many readers, originality does not matter as long as the read is enjoyable. And this, when it comes to introducing the book to the general public, should be what matters for now.
Words by Joanna Fragoulis
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