Exclusive: Guardian Australia uncovers multiple near-identical phrases and scenes in John Hughes’ book The Dogs and Svetlana Alexievich’s nonfiction work The Unwomanly Face of War
Guardian Australia also found conceptual similarities between incidents described in the books, including the central scene from which The Dogs takes its title.Hughes – an Australian descendent of Ukrainian refugees – has received critical acclaim for his novel about the intergenerational impact of wartime trauma.
Her 1985 work The Unwomanly Face of War is one of five books in her Voices of Utopia cycle, depicting life in the Soviet Union through oral testimonies. Collating interviews she conducted with more than 200 women who fought for the Soviet Union in the second world war, the nonfiction work took her more than four years to research and write.
He had first read The Unwomanly Face of War when it came out in English in 2017, he said, and had used it to teach creative writing students about voice, acknowledging Alexievich as the source.“I typed up the passages I wanted to use and have not returned to the book itself since,” he said. “At some point soon after I must have added them to the transcripts I’d made of interviews with my grandparents and over the years and … [had] come to think of them as my own.
Hughes’ publisher, Terri-ann White, at Upswell Publishing, said she “stands steadfast alongside the author, despite the appropriations now evident in this text”. The judges of the 2022 NSW premier’s Literary Awards referred to this revelation as central to the novel’s exploration of “the ways an unspoken secret can shape the present”.