Distribution of Toronto writer Paul William Roberts’s acclaimed A War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq, has been halted because the book plagiarized an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Passages in five pages of Truth, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction, closely paralleled those in an article on US defense policy by the Atlanta paper’s deputy editorial page editor.

The discovery was made by a blogger in late December, Vancouver’s Raincoast Books halted shipments of the book in early January, and on Jan. 19 Roberts apologized for his “egregious lapse of professional conduct” and “journalistic travesty” in a letter to the Journal-Constitution, according to “Shipments of bestseller halted“, a James Adams article in the Feb. 3 Globe and Mail.

Roberts, a Harper’s contributor whose recent novel Homeland portrays a North American dystopia in the near future, puts his failure down to sloppy transcription of the article, which was e-mailed to him in Iraq at a time when paper and printers were very difficult to access.

Negotiations are underway to resolve the matter, and solutions may include distributing existing books with a correction, according to the Globe. The Journal-Constitution article’s author, Jay Bookman, told Adams: “Our main concern is that this occurred and people should be aware of it and then make their own judgment.”