Passages from Nobel laureate's work end up in someone else's novel

Passages from an award-nominated novel have been found to be similar to — and sometimes identical — text from a Nobel laureate's nonfiction work.

Guardian Australia confirmed its observations about the connection between The Dogs by John Hughes and The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich by using document comparison software.

The newspaper contacted Hughes about the nearly sixty instances highlighted by the software, and he provided a statement explaining how such a thing had happened.

In a nutshell: he believes that he typed up passages from the English translation of Alexievich's book to use when he taught creative writing, and that those passages later became mixed in with transcripts of interviews he'd done, long ago, with his grandparents.

The paper also contacted Alexievich and her translators.

The former said she'd never heard of or from Hughes, while the latter hoped that judges for the Miles Franklin Literary Award — Australia's top literary prize, which The Dogs is under consideration for — would be made aware of the plagiarism.

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