John Hughes (born 1961) is a Sydney-based Australian writer and retired teacher. His first book of autobiographical essays, ''The Idea of Home'', published by

Giramondo Giramondo Publishing (Giramondo Publishing Company) is an independent Australian literary small press founded in 1995. It is a publisher of poetry, fiction and non-fiction by Australian and overseas writers, and works in translation from Chinese, ...

in 2004, was widely acclaimed and won both the

New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards The New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, also known as the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, were first awarded in 1979. They are among the richest literary awards in Australia. Notable prizes include the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, th ...

for Non-Fiction (2005) and the

National Biography Award The National Biography Award, established in Australia in 1996, is awarded for the best published work of biographical or autobiographical writing by an Australian. It aims "to encourage the highest standards of writing biography and autobiography ...

(2006). In 2022, Hughes faced accusations of plagiarism in his 2021 book ''The Dogs.''

Biography

Hughes was born in

Cessnock, New South Wales Cessnock is a city in the Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia, about by road west of Newcastle, New South Wales, Newcastle. It is the administrative centre of the City of Cessnock Local government in Australia, LGA and was named after a ...

to a father of Welsh descent and a mother who was of Ukrainian descent. Hughes wrote that as a second generation Australian, he "lived in two worlds as a child": one world the routine, real world of Cessnock and the second the exotic foreign world of his European family's past. The sense that he was 'foreign' became central to his sense of self. He felt connected to an imagined past of his grandparents. As a child stories were told to him of how his grandparents fled Kiev during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

and had walked on foot across Europe to

Naples Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...

. From Naples, they emigrated to Australia. The text in "The Idea of Home" is devoted to the stories of this journey passed down from Hughes' grandfather, and their impact on a young John Hughes. Hughes undertook a medical degree, but shortly realised it was not for him. He switched to an undergraduate arts degree at

Newcastle University Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a UK public university, public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is ...

in the late 1970s, and at the end of his Honours year, was offered the Shell Scholarship to

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

. His preconceived notions of Europe as a place vastly more sophisticated than his provincial Cessnock prompted him to go. However, as he spent more time in England, and struggled through a PhD on

Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poe ...

, he realised that his ideas were wrong, and that provincialism was, if not as obvious, certainly still as potent in what was considered the centre of the academic world. After this, he gave up his "life of letters", as he called it, and returned to Australia. Back in Sydney, he unsuccessfully tried to teach at his old university, Newcastle, but his failure at Cambridge haunted him. He did, however, complete a PhD thesis at UTS, called "Memory and Forgetting". In 1995, Hughes took a position in the English Department of

Sydney Grammar School (Praise be to God) , established = , type = Independent, day school , gender = Boys , religious_affiliation = None , slogan = , headmaster = R. B. Malpass , founder = Laurence Hynes Halloran , chairman = ...

, where he is Senior Master in English and Senior Librarian. He runs Sydney Grammar's Creative Writing Group and Extension Two English at the school. As well as his interest in longer forms, Hughes has been published in HEAT Magazine, edited by

Ivor Indyk Ivor Indyk (born 1949) is an Australian literary academic, editor and publisher. He is a professor at the University of Western Sydney, and the founding editor and publisher of award-winning literary imprint Giramondo Publishing and ''HEAT'' mag ...

Plagiarism controversy

Hughes was accused of plagiarising significant sections of his 2021 book ''The Dogs'' by ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

''. ''Guardian Australia'' identified close to 60 similarities between Hughes' book and ''The Unwomanly Face of War'' by Svetlana Alexievich. Hughes admitted the plagiarism, although he said it was unintentional. Hughes acknowledged he had unwittingly copied large sections of

Svetlana Alexievich Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich (born 31 May 1948) is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suff ...

's nonfiction book ''The Unwomanly Face of War''. His publisher Upswell Publishing initially stood by his claims that he had forgotten his original source material because he had "never written a book like ''The Dogs'' before that has taken so many different forms over so many years". Alexievich said that such actions were "outrageous" and her translators have similarly expressed their disbelief at the claim that the plagiarism was unintentional. Her translators said "Such things don't happen by coincidence: not with such specific words, sequences, voicing," and said the incident deserved public attention and reproach. Further investigations found that other parts of Hughes' novel copied classic texts including ''The Great Gatsby'', ''Anna Karenina'', and ''All Quiet on the Western Front''. Hughes said: "I don't think I am a plagiarist more than any other writer who has been influenced by the greats who have come before them...This new material has led me to reflect on my process as a writer. I've always used the work of other writers in my own. It's a rare writer who doesn't ... It's a question of degree. As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Sacred Wood, 'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.' That great centrepiece of modernism, The Wasteland, is itself a kind of anthology of the great words of others. Does this make Eliot a plagiarist? Not at all, it seems. You take, that is, and make something else out of it; you make it your own.” Hughes' publisher Terri-ann White at Upswell had initially stood by his claims of an accidental mistake, but distanced herself from Hughes after the new findings. She stated, "When I read the manuscript of ''The Dogs'', I was instantly attracted to the character of Michael Shamanov, a dissolute and very flawed middle-aged man dealing with his aged mother who wanted her life to end. Although I have read most of the books now revealed as being quoted without attribution in ''The Dogs'', I sincerely did not recognise them folded into a new text. That's a trust thing, I think. They formed part of this narrative; I don’t have the kind of mind that can sift through the strands of a long novel to hear discord. Besides, it is a book about discord and discomfort between people. (In literary publishing we do not use software tools to track plagiarism.) I was affronted when John Hughes wrote, in his rejoinder in ''The Guardian'' yesterday: ''I wanted the appropriated passages to be seen and recognised as in a collage''." In response to this statement, Hughes apologised and said that "In my piece on influences I never intended to imply that I had knowingly passed off other writers words as my own," Hughes said. "I sought only to try to clarify as far as I am able how something like this might happen to a fiction writer." The novel was subsequently removed form the Miles Franklin Award long list.

Works

''The Idea of Home''

This autobiographical novel was written over a ten-year period. It is a collection of five interlinked essays where Hughes describes his relationship with the Ukrainian heritage of his mother and grandfather and his childhood experience of growing up as a second generation Australian. The essays are also about how the idea of Europe he developed as a young man clashed with the reality he found in Cambridge and when he travelled though Europe.

''The Remnants''

A manuscript written by an Australian art historian is discovered by his son. Claiming to have found a series of lost paintings by

Piero della Francesca Piero della Francesca (, also , ; – 12 October 1492), originally named Piero di Benedetto, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca i ...

Arezzo Arezzo ( , , ) , also ; ett, 𐌀𐌓𐌉𐌕𐌉𐌌, Aritim. is a city and ''comune'' in Italy and the capital of the province of the same name located in Tuscany. Arezzo is about southeast of Florence at an elevation of above sea level. ...

, the father's manuscript moves between Renaissance Italy and post-Revolutionary Russia – at its core is the relationship the father has with an ageing Russian émigrée who, haunted by the ghost of her murdered son, claims to have nursed the poet

Osip Mandelstam Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam ( rus, Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам, p=ˈosʲɪp ɨˈmʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ mənʲdʲɪlʲˈʂtam; – 27 December 1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was one of the foremost members of the Acm ...

in his final days. The remnants of the father's manuscripts, notebooks and diaries are brought together through the son's commentary resulting in a deeply philosophical novel about translation between languages, cultures and, ultimately, the translation of the father into the son.

''The Dogs''

Michael Shamanov is a man running away from life's responsibilities. His marriage is over, he barely sees his son and he has not seen his mother since banishing her to a nursing home two years earlier. A successful screen writer, Michael's encounter with his mother’s nurse leads him to discover that the greatest story he has never heard may lie with his dying mother. The book was shortlisted for the Victorian and New South Wales Premier’s Literary Prizes, and the

Miles Franklin Award The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–195 ...

in 2022. It was withdrawn from competition due to findings of plagiarism.

Awards

* 2005 –

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction for ''The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays'' * 2005 – shortlisted for the

Community Relations Commission Award for ''The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays'' * 2006 –

for ''The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays'' * 2006 – inducted into the City of Cessnock Hall of Fame * 2008 – Queensland Premier's Literary Awards, Australian Short Story Collection – Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award for ''Someone Else'' *2020 – shortlisted

for ''No One'' *2022 – shortlisted for

Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction The Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, is a prize category in the annual Victorian Premier's Literary Award. As of 2011 it has an remuneration of 25,000. The winner of this category prize vi ...

for ''The Dogs'' *2022 – shortlisted for

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for ''The Dogs'' *''2022'' - longlisted

for ''The Dogs''. ithdrawn

Bibliography

Books

*''The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays'' (Giramondo, 2004) *''Someone else: fictional essays'' (Giramondo Pub. for the Writing & Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, 2007) *''The Remnants'' (UWA Publishing, 2012) *''The Garden of Sorrows'' (UWA Publishing, 2013) *''Asylum'' (UWA Publishing, 2016) *''No One'' (UWA Publishing, 2019) *''The Dogs'' (Upswell, 2021)

Journal articles

* * * * *

Plays

* ''Untitled:A Play in Three Acts'', written and directed by John Hughes: performed at the Asian Music and Dance Festival at the Studio at Sydney Opera House in 2002SMH Review (19 August 2002)
/small>

Notes

References

Sydney Morning Herald (retrieved 15 August 2007)

Sydney Morning Herald (retrieved 15 August 2007)

Radio National Radio National, known on-air as RN, is an Australia-wide public service broadcasting radio network run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). From 1947 until 1985, the network was known as ABC Radio 2. History 1937: Predecessors an ...

, Australia Talks Books (Retrieved 15 August 2007)
Memory and Home by John Hughes
Keynote Address presented at the Perth Day of Ideas, Institute of Advance Studies, University of WA in September 2006 (Retrieved 14 August 2007) {{DEFAULTSORT:Hughes, John 1961 births Australian memoirists Living people Australian schoolteachers University of Newcastle (Australia) alumni University of Technology Sydney alumni People from Cessnock, New South Wales __FORCETOC__