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Editorial assistant is La Plante’s prime suspect

Prime Suspect screenwriter Lynda La Plante says she never copied sections from another book for a 1993 novel.

Prime Suspect screenwriter Lynda La Plante is at the centre of accusations of plagiarism over a 1993 novel she wrote on the survivors of Auschwitz, Entwined. The book was published prior to her success as the mastermind of the acclaimed Prime Suspect series.

An Australian reader, Andy Kirton, noticed that lengthy passages in La Plante’s thriller were almost identical to sections from a 1947 book called Five Chimneys, by a Holocaust survivor, Olga Lengyel.

When The Age newspaper asked how this came about, La Plante’s lawyers said she had never read Five Chimneys herself, but that a research assistant she no longer uses may have lifted the passages.

In Entwined there are no acknowledgements either to La Plante’s assistant or to sources used.

Dr Jeremy Fisher, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors said there is often a grey area between plagiarism and the failure to acknowledge sources. “Word-for-word plagiarism, or plagiarism where only a word or two is changed, is basic theft,” he said. “But non-acknowledgement of sources, even if it’s not plagiarism as such, is pushing the boundaries of ethics and taste.

“Where an author has done significant personal research or got access to material through their own endeavour, and another author has come in and just rewritten it without acknowledgement and claimed it as their own, it’s unethical at the very least.”

La Plante is due in Australia next month for a publicity tour.

Source: The Age

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