Plagiarism?

The latest New Zealand Listener has a cover photograph of Witi Ihimaera and the lead story is his apology for his errors in using the writing of other people in his latest work The Trowenna Sea. It tells the story of Hohepa Te Umuroa, who was convicted of insurrection and transported as a convict to Tasmania with four other Maori in the 1840s. The similarities in passages of his work to the words of other writers was uncovered by reviewer Jolisa Gracewood.

Jolisa has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell Universityand has taught non-fiction writing at Yale University.  She was named Reviewer of the Year at the 2006 New Zealand Book Awards and publishes regularly in the New Zealand Listener, the New Haven Advocate, and Landfall.  She  is an occasional contributor to the Public Address blog and has alluded to the controversy in her most recent post.

The Listener also has a back up article about famous examples of plagiarism and what it calls “a fine and ever-changing line between what’s allowable and what’s not.”

On the international stage Britain’s poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion is fighting his corner over vitriolic attacks on using other people’s work in an official Armistice Day poem he wrote.