Shin Kyung-sook, author of “Please Look After Mom”. (AP Photo/Knopf, Lee Byungryul)

—Associated Press

SEOUL—One of South Korea’s highest profile authors apologized on Tuesday as her publisher confirmed it would withdraw a collection of her short stories in response to an allegation of plagiarism.

Shin Kyung-sook, winner of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize, was recently accused by another local author of copying parts of “Patriotism” by late Japanese author Yukio Mishima in her short story “Legend,” published in 1996 in a compilation of stories.

Ms. Shin initially responded by saying she wasn’t familiar with Mr. Mishima’s work, which was published in 1961. On Tuesday, she said she was no longer sure that she hadn’t read the book and couldn’t be sure it hadn’t influenced her.

“As I compared the sentences I couldn’t believe it myself,” she said in an interview with the Kyunghyang newspaper, acknowledging the similarities between passages in each book. “I cannot trust my own memory,” she said.

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