Shin Kyung-sook, the South Korean novelist who won the Man Asian literary prize four years ago, has apologised to her readers, admitting that “everything is my fault” after being accused of plagiarism.
Shin had previously denied allegations that she had plagiarised passages from the Japanese author Yukio Mishima’s novel Patriotism in her 1996 short story Legend.
The accusation was made by the poet and novelist Lee Eung-jun in the Huffington Post. Lee quoted lines from both pieces, arguing that it was “a clear case of plagiarism, a dishonest act of a literary work which cannot be acceptable to any professional literature writer.”
Last week, Shin released a statement from her publisher to the Korea Times, saying that she had only read Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
She also declared that she felt “sorry to let my readers undergo such a commotion . . . as I have weathered hardships (together with my fans), I want my fans to believe me”.
The Korea Times report that Shin’s collection of short stories The Strawberry Field, and her novel The Train Departs at 7, were the subject of previous plagiarism allegations in 2000 which she also denied.
