As a child stories were told to him of how his grandparents fled Kiev during the Second World War and had walked on foot across Europe to Naples.
He switched to an undergraduate arts degree at Newcastle University in the late 1970s,[3] and at the end of his Honours year, was offered the Shell Scholarship to Cambridge.
However, as he spent more time in England, and struggled through a PhD on Coleridge, he realised that his ideas were wrong, and that provincialism was, if not as obvious, certainly still as potent in what was considered the centre of the academic world.
As well as his interest in longer forms, Hughes has been published in HEAT Magazine, edited by Ivor Indyk.
Guardian Australia identified close to 60 similarities between Hughes' book and The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich.
There were thirty of us … No one could look at me … No one … You understand …Hughes acknowledged he had unwittingly copied large sections of Svetlana Alexievich's nonfiction book The Unwomanly Face of War.
[7] Alexievich said that such actions were "outrageous" and her translators have similarly expressed their disbelief at the claim that the plagiarism was unintentional.
Her translators said "Such things don't happen by coincidence: not with such specific words, sequences, voicing," and said the incident deserved public attention and reproach.
[6] Further investigations found that other parts of Hughes' novel copied classic texts including The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” All Quiet on the Western Front (published in 2005 in translation by Brian Murdoch) “Haie Westhus is carried off with his back torn open; you can see the lung throbbing through the wound with every breath he takes”… “We see men go on living with the top of their skulls missing; we see soldiers go on running when both their feet have been shot away”… The Dogs "She saw a man carried off with his back torn open, the lung throbbing through the wound."
[10] She stated, "When I read the manuscript of The Dogs, I was instantly attracted to the character of Michael Shamanov, a dissolute and very flawed middle-aged man dealing with his aged mother who wanted her life to end.
They formed part of this narrative; I don’t have the kind of mind that can sift through the strands of a long novel to hear discord.
I was affronted when John Hughes wrote, in his rejoinder in The Guardian yesterday: I wanted the appropriated passages to be seen and recognised as in a collage.
[4] It is a collection of five interlinked essays where Hughes describes his relationship with the Ukrainian heritage of his mother and grandfather and his childhood experience of growing up as a second generation Australian.
Claiming to have found a series of lost paintings by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, the father's manuscript moves between Renaissance Italy and post-Revolutionary Russia – at its core is the relationship the father has with an ageing Russian émigrée who, haunted by the ghost of her murdered son, claims to have nursed the poet Osip Mandelstam in his final days.
The book was shortlisted for the Victorian and New South Wales Premier’s Literary Prizes, and the Miles Franklin Award in 2022.