Blogger uses Google to catch a word thief

He is one of New Zealand's must successful authors, and he is the most famous Maori writer alive. But the reputation of Witi Ihimaera, a professor of English who holds the title of Distinguished Creative Fellow in Maori Literature at the University of Auckland, has been badly damaged. He has been caught plagiarizing.

Jolisa Gracewood, a New Zealand writer who lives in New York, reviewed Ihimaera's latest book, The Trowenna Sea, for the New Zealand Listener. Gracewood said that while reading the novel, she had a feeling something was not right with parts of the text. In her blog, she wrote that "Google was my first port of call. It turns out that Google is bad news for authors, in at least one more way than previously suspected..."

Gracewood found paragraphs from journalist Peter Godwin, American academic Karen Sinclair and works by Charles Dickens in Ihimaera's book. "The tragedy is that this is a very, very fine piece of New Zealand fiction," Penguin New Zealand director Geoff Walker told the New Zealand Herald. "It deserves to be read, and it's a terrible shame that this has happened."