How Witi was found out
By Yvonne Tahana writing in The New Zealand Herald,
Saturday Nov 07, 2009
Plagiarism was revealed in Witi Ihimaera's newest novel when a book reviewer googled phrases from The Trowenna Sea.
Jolisa Gracewood reviewed the book, which went on sale at the beginning of the week, for the New Zealand Listener.
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.
In her blog, Jolisa Gracewood said that while reading the novel, she had a feeling something was not right with parts of the text.
"Google was my first port of call - it turns out that Google Books is bad news for authors, in at least one more way than previously suspected ..."
However, there was "no joy" in stumbling across 16 examples which the magazine put to Ihimaera.
Gracewood said that as a writing teacher, "I'd occasionally come across a phrase or a paragraph that was somehow out of kilter with the surrounding text. It's a curiously physical phenomenon: the hairs on the back of your neck go up, and your heart sinks. "Sometimes it's a false alarm," she said. "But I never expected to encounter that feeling as a book reviewer, let alone with a new work by a respected writer." The full story at NZH.
Jolisa Gracewood's blog.
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