Australia’s most prestigious books prize, the Miles Franklin literary award, has pulled The Canines by John Hughes from its 2022 longlist, a day after Hughes apologised for plagiarising elements of the work of a Nobel laureate “with out realising” in his acclaimed novel.
Following a Guardian Australia investigation that uncovered 58 similarities and cases of similar textual content between elements of Hughes’ 2021 novel The Canines and the 2017 English translation of Svetlana Alexievich’s nonfiction The Unwomanly Face of Battle, Hughes apologised to Alexievich and her translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky “for utilizing their phrases with out acknowledgment”.
In an announcement to Guardian Australia on Friday, a spokesperson for Perpetual, the trustee for the Miles Franklin literary award, mentioned: “After being made conscious of circumstances surrounding longlisted novel The Canines, Perpetual, as trustee of the Miles Franklin literary award, has consulted with the judging panel and the writer and it has been agreed that the novel be withdrawn from the longlist.”
“The shortlisted finalists will likely be revealed on 23 June 2022 and the winner introduced on 20 July 2022.”
Hughes’ writer, Terri-ann White at Upswell Publishing, confirmed she had requested for The Canines to be withdrawn from competition for the $60,000 prize.
“There was strong dialogue and conjecture already concerning the background supplied by writer and writer,” White mentioned in an announcement. “As our joint response acknowledged, we weren't justifying something: it was a transparent appropriation of different individuals’s phrases (these ladies Svetlana Alexievich listened to, alongside her phrases). It was not deliberate; it was human error.
“It's a salutary reminder to imaginative writers who don’t use the formal instruments of scholarship that ‘false reminiscence’ – self-attribution of the writing of others after changing into very aware of its locution – is a severe consideration earlier than submitting for publication. If John Hughes had meant to plagiarise as profitable a ebook because the magnificent The Unwomanly Face of Battle, he would have modified the phrases in these brief descriptive passages. This painful incident has not decreased my respect for John Hughes as a author.”
The Canines was longlisted for the Miles Franklin prize in Might, and was beforehand shortlisted for the 2022 Victorian premier’s and 2022 NSW premier’s literary awards for fiction.
First awarded in 1957, the Miles Franklin literary award is offered annually to a novel of the best literary benefit. It's a situation of the prize’s 2022 tips that “all entries should consist solely of the writer’s unique work”.
Alexievich’s ebook The Unwomanly Face of Battle was first revealed in Russian in 1985. It collates interviews carried out by Alexievich with greater than 200 ladies who fought for the Soviet Union within the second world battle.
In 2015, the Belarusian journalist was awarded the Nobel prize in literature for her historic “polyphonic writings, a monument to struggling and braveness in our time”.
When first approached by Guardian Australia concerning the similarities between his novel and Alexievich’s ebook, Hughes mentioned he had made “many recordings and transcripts” along with his Ukrainian grandparents, who instructed of many related cases to these contained in The Unwomanly Face of Battle.
Hughes mentioned he learn it when it got here out in English in 2017, and used it to show inventive writing college students about voice, acknowledging Alexievich because the supply.
“I typed up the passages I needed to make use of and haven't returned to the ebook itself since,” he mentioned. “At some point after I should have added them to the transcripts I’d product of interviews with my grandparents and over time and … [had] come to consider them as my very own.”
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