Lynda La Plante - Controversy

Controversy

In 2008, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that sections of her 1993 book Entwined appear to be plagiarized from the 1947 Olga Lengyel book Five Chimneys. The main characters in Entwined are twins who survive medical experimentation during their childhood in Auschwitz, are separated after the war, and reunited many years later. Five Chimneys is Lengyel's firsthand account of the medical experiments that she witnessed as a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. Some of the Auschwitz scenes in Entwined appear to be very closely based on passages from Lengyel's memoir. La Plante admits this, but says that she never read Lengyel's work herself, and claims that a researcher was responsible for the paragraphs in question.

In a 2010 interview with The Telegraph, La Plante complained, “If my name were Usafi Iqbadal and I was 19, then they’d probably bring me in and talk.” “But... it’s their lack of respect that really grates on me.” She went on to say, "If you were to go to the BBC and say to them, ‘Listen, Lynda La Plante’s written a new drama, or I have this little Muslim boy who's just written one’, they’d say: ‘Oh, we’d like to see his script.’” Ben Stephenson (BBC Controller of Drama) responded, "She has one piece at the moment, and one that we paid fully for the script development. She wrote the script but ultimately we decided we didn't share the vision for that project so we parted. So she absolutely got in the door."