Penguin Random House defends Zhivago novel against plagiarism claim

Boris Pasternak’s great-niece Anna claims Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept copied her biography of Pasternak’s lover

Publisher Penguin Random House has dismissed claims that Lara Prescott, a debut novelist who received a $2m (£1.6m) advance for her novel about the publication of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, infringed the copyright of Pasternak’s great-niece Anna Pasternak as “simply without any merit”.

Published in September, Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept tells of how the CIA planned to use Doctor Zhivago as a propaganda tool during the cold war. But Anna Pasternak revealed in the Sunday Times that she had sent a legal letter to Prescott, claiming that the novel features “an astonishing number of substantial elements” copied from Pasternak’s 2016 biography Lara, which is about Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s lover, muse and inspiration for his character Lara.

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