#korean novelist

A South Korean author who won the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for her novel, Please Look After Mom, has acknowledged having plagiarized material for a short story published in 1996.

In an interview with a local South Korean newspaper Tuesday, Shin Kyung-sook, 52, apologized to readers and said her publisher, Changbi, will remove the short story, “Legend,” from future editions of her collection of short stories.

Shin’s remarks come a week after fellow South Korean novelist Lee Eung-jun wrote an online article for Huffington Post Korea, accusing Shin of lifting a passage from a 1983 Korean translation of “Patriotism,” a 1961 story by the late Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Both passages describe a young couple’s sexual awakening.

A day after Lee’s article appeared, Shin denied any familiarity with the Japanese author or his work, but has since changed her tune, saying she could no longer be sure of her memory.

“I desperately tried to recall my memory only to find that I haven’t read ‘Patriotism,’ but now I’m in a situation where even I can’t believe my own memory,” Shin was quoted as saying by Yonhap News Agency in her interview with the Kyunghyang Shinmun.

This isn’t the first instance in which the acclaimed author—one of South Korea’s most widely read—has faced allegations of plagiarism. In 1999, according to a blog run by Melville House, an independent publishing house in Brooklyn, South Korean literary critic Park Cheol-hwa suggested that sections of Shin’s work, “Goodbye,” closely matched Kenji Maruyama’s “Water Family.” The dispute was never resolved.

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