John Hughes’s novel The Dogs has been withdrawn from the longlist for the Miles Franklin Prize after an investigation by The Guardian identified numerous instances of plagiarism. Hughes’s lifting of passages from other books has sparked furious debate and literary detective work – mostly on Twitter – prompting questions about the nature of influences, literary pastiche and the attribution of sources in novels.
Hughes acknowledged he had unintentionally borrowed from the 2017 English translation of Nobel prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War, after The Guardian applied document comparison software to both books, finding 58 similarities and some identical sentences.
