Posts filed under 'plagiarism'

Judging the Author, Not the Book: Exploring the Discourse of the Shafak Plagiarism Case

February 12, 2026  |  in Essays  |  by Neriman Kuyucu Norman

The most radical act of resistance remains to be a truly critical reader.

Elif Shafak is one of Turkey’s most globally renowned writers, having been translated into over fifty languages, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and named a Chevalier of l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. As such, when she was accused and then indicted of plagiarism in 2021, it sent deep reverberations throughout the Turkish literary scene. In this following essay, Neriman Kuyucu Norman examines the details of the case against Shafak—and why it is always important to look beyond the surface representation of such matters.

On October 19, 2021, Turkish author and columnist Mine Kırıkkanat filed a plagiarism lawsuit against the internationally acclaimed British-Turkish author Elif Shafak and her Turkish publisher Doğan Kitap. Kırıkkanat claimed that Şafak’s 2002 bestseller The Flea Palace (Bit Palas) was a structural copy of Kırıkkanat’s 1990 novel The Flies’ Palace (Sinek Sarayı). Last November, the 16th Civil Chamber of the Istanbul Regional Court of Justice issued a ruling concluding that the similarities found in Shafak’s novel went beyond mere inspiration.

The court’s ruling was based on a 35-page expert report that confirms the absence of any direct plagiarism of sentences or dialogue. Instead, the report identifies what it describes as a structural and thematic overlap, accounting for nearly 5% of the book. Based on this finding, the court ordered substantial penalties, including financial damages, a total market recall, and a ban on future printing. Doğan Kitap has formally contested these measures, claiming that both the publisher and Shafak will seek a reversal of the decision through the Supreme Court of Appeals.

Having recently read R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023), which tackles the blurred boundaries between creative inspiration and intellectual theft, I found the court’s decision particularly compelling. The case against Shafak brings the core dilemma of Kuang’s narrative to the forefront: What constitutes plagiarism within the realm of creative writing? Can a concept or a literary idea ever truly be owned by a single person? How does public reaction recalibrate the parameters of intellectual theft? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 6, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Hodna Nuernberg, and Rachel Allen

This week's literary news from Morocco, Albania, and the United States!

This week our reporters bring you news of Morocco’s publishing industry—including reports of a plagiarism scandal—the release of Albanian LGBT activist Kristi Pinderi’s memoir, and a series of events celebrating global literary publication and design in New York. Read on to find out more!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco 

The King Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation, a Casablanca-based non-profit organization that provides rare and rigorous documentation about Morocco’s publishing industry, released its fifth annual report in February to coincide with the Casablanca International Book Fair.

According to the report, some 4,219 titles were published in Morocco last year, representing a steady growth of the publishing industry’s output. In 1987, by comparison, Morocco published 850 titles. But this increased production is served by an increasingly fragile distribution network: whereas Casablanca was home to 65 bookstores in 1987, only 15 remain today. Kenza Sefrioui, author of the meticulously researched (if disheartening) Le livre à l’épreuve, estimates that there is no more than one bookstore per 86,000 inhabitants and 84.5 percent of Moroccans do not have a library card.

The trend towards the Arabization of Morocco’s publishing industry continued in 2019, with Arabic accounting for 78 percent of literary works; French comprised 18 percent, and Tamazight just over 1 percent. Of these literary works, poetry is the dominant genre with the novel coming in a close second. And while 11.5 percent of literary works published last year were translations, nearly half of these translations were from the French (and almost a quarter from the English).

Moroccan books are, on average, the least expensive books in the Maghreb. The average price of a book published in Morocco is 72.74 dirhams, or about the cost of 10 liters of milk. In neighboring Algeria, the average price is 85.93 dirhams, while in Tunisia it’s 90.81. But in a country where a majority of people earn less than 2,500 dirhams a month, 72.74 dirhams can seem a prohibitive price.

The report ends with a sobering statistic: in Morocco in 2019, a whopping 83 percent of published works were written by men. READ MORE…