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Monday, January 31, 2005
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BRAZENING IT OUT
IN COMMUNICADO " Jooste's Novel to Remain on Sale Despite Admission of Plagiarism By Aziz Hartley Cape Times Despite an admission that South African writer Pamela Jooste had copied someone else's writing, her novel, People Like Ourselves, will remain on sale. This was confirmed yesterday by Stephen Johnson, managing director of Random House. "We have no plans to withdraw copies of the book," he said. The Cape Town-based Jooste has meanwhile gone to ground in the Eastern Cape and could not be contacted. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that Jooste had plagiarised sections of an article by Wits academic Lindsay Bremner published in the paper's lifestyle supplement three years ago. "Bremner's lawyer, Claire Wright, confirmed that Jooste had infringed Bremner's copyright," according to the report. Johnson could not indicate yesterday how many copies of People Like Ourselves had been printed. Asked whether he knew of any other sections of the novel that might have been plagiarised, he said there were none. Johnson was reported to have said they had become aware of the problem after they were informed by a representative of Bremner in November last year. He said Jooste could not reached. "She is in-communicado. We expect to speak to her some time next week. "She is on holiday in the Eastern Cape," he said. According to the Sunday Times report, Jooste's lawyer, not named, had admitted she had used approximately 400 words penned by Bremner, who received the first Sunday Times Bessie Head fellowship in 2001. The lawyer had also written to Bremner conceding Jooste had failed to attribute authorship of the passages used in the book and apologised for embarrassing Bremner." ********************************************************* Embarrassing Bremner? Whatever. More detail here. |