A piece of writing that won the Caribbean category of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize has come under scrutiny after readers alleged that it may have been generated using artificial intelligence tools.
The Serpent in the Grove by Trinidad and Tobago writer Jamir Nazir was announced last week as the Caribbean regional winner of the annual prize, which recognises unpublished fiction from across the Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, launched in 2012 by the Commonwealth Foundation, awards £2,500 to each regional winner and £5,000 to the overall winner, who will be announced on 30 June.
The prize accepts unpublished short fiction between 2,000 and 5,000 words and is open to writers from the Commonwealth’s 56 member states.
The foundation said this year’s competition received 7,806 entries from 51 member nations, with regional winners selected from a shortlist of 25 stories.
The Serpent in the Grove was subsequently published on 12 May by Granta, which has hosted the prize-winning entries online since 2012.
Set in rural Trinidad, the story follows “a struggling farmer, a silenced young wife, and a grove that seems to remember what human beings try to bury”.
The judging panel, chaired by the novelist Louise Doughty, praised Nazir’s “precise yet richly evocative” language and described the story as “a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling”.
The judges said the prose “pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority”.
According to a Commonwealth Foundation biography, Nazir is a “Trinidadian writer of East Indian heritage whose work explores the cultural intersections of the Caribbean and the Indian diaspora”.
The controversy began shortly after the story’s publication as readers online pointed to what they described as stylistic features commonly associated with AI.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wrote on Bluesky that the story was a “Turing test of sorts”.
Several readers pointed out what they called “AI tells”, including AI researcher Nabeel S Qureshi. “Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize. ‘Not X, not Y, but Z’ sentences everywhere, the ‘hums’ trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.”
Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).
— Nabeel S. Qureshi (@nabeelqu) May 18, 2026
"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.
A major milestone for AI, at any rate...@GrantaMag https://t.co/BWGBpRasNz pic.twitter.com/U6jWejprFv
The story opens with the lines: “They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound — as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.”
The word “hum”, which researchers say is overused by AI, appears again in the following paragraph.
omg. He has a public Facebook page to promote his "book of love poems" and this is the level of writing on there - meanwhile @GrantaMag selected his story out of 8000 entrants....every literary magazine needs to institute a basic online background check and basic AI review by… https://t.co/mMboq7gFuk pic.twitter.com/LcKvxv7la8
— Claire A 📚 (@CoffeeandIrony) May 18, 2026
Elsewhere, the story describes “the sour tang of fermenting cocoa” and a roof that “groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat”.
Curious, many users began to look up Nazir and his other writing, with one X user writing that searches for the author produced little beyond “a book of ‘love poems’ self-published in 2018, with a blurry stock photo on the cover, and a bunch of random Facebook and LinkedIn posts”.
This story gets flagged by @pangramlabs as completely AI-generated. And oddly high score: writing from South Asia etc sometimes gets flagged as some degree of generated, but almost never this high. Curious, I searched for Jamir Nazir, this writer from Trinidad and Tobago . . . https://t.co/T1IXMKU1lD pic.twitter.com/lmVtie0cFb
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (@yudhanjaya) May 19, 2026
Some looked up his LinkedIn profile and pointed to posts about artificial intelligence and its impact on work and society.
One user said on X: “He has quite an obsession with AI, how it is a force for good, and all that Linkedin bulls***.”
While some social media users speculated that Nazir might not be real himself, since his author photo appeared to be AI-generated, a Wired report cited a 2018 article in the Trinidad and Tobago edition of the Guardian, which featured a photograph of Nazir holding his poetry collection Night Moon Love.
We AI write. We
— Selen (@writingenjoyer) May 19, 2026
LinkedIn invite. We
Zoongie greet. We
Pangram cheat. We
Granta statement. We
£5k payment. We
serpent garden. We
Tokarczuk pardon.
Everyone keeps saying that Jamir Nazir is a totally AI-generated person, but he appears to really exist and live in Trinidad and Tobago, even if he did use allegedly AI for his award winning poetry and used AI to create a headshot. https://t.co/mzISA3rtXc pic.twitter.com/rAnTeH7kTd
— Jacqueline Sweet (@JSweetLI) May 19, 2026
According to The Free Press, AI-detection platforms Pangram and Grammarly both identified The Serpent in the Grove as “100 percent” AI-generated, while GPTZero, another AI-detection tool for machine-written text, classified it as “entirely human” and QuillBot, a writing and paraphrasing platform that also offers AI-detection software, found a “zero percent likelihood” of its machine authorship.
The Independent ran the story through Pangram and received the same result, with the software claiming it was AI-generated. Its analysis pointed out the grouping of triads in the sentence “damp earth, woodsmoke and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa” as a “common AI rhetorical pattern” and flagged the use of some words and phrases such as “stubborn” and “as if it had” as more likely to appear in AI-generated writing.
Granta addressed the allegations in a statement from its publisher, Sigrid Rausing, who noted that the magazine had “no control over the selection of the Commonwealth Prize stories” and played no role in choosing the jury.
Rausing said Granta had shown The Serpent in the Grove to Anthropic’s Claude AI, which concluded it was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human”, but suggested that “if the story has a human core, it is concentrated” in some specific passages and “AI has been used to elaborate around it”.
“It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism,” Rausing said, “we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”
She added that “more than one” Commonwealth prize-winning story had faced allegations of AI use.
A user on X pointed out that Pangram had flagged The Bastion’s Shadow by Maltese writer John Edward DeMicoli, winner for the Canada and Europe region, as fully AI-generated while Mehendi Nights by Indian writer Sharon Aruparayil, winner for Asia, was scanned as partly AI-generated.
The Independent has reached out to Nazir, DeMicoli and Aruparayil for comment.
As the allegations spread, the Commonwealth Foundation put out a statement to its website saying it was carrying out “a thorough, transparent review of the selection process”.
“We are aware of allegations and discussion regarding generative AI and our Short Story Prize,” Razmi Farook, director general of the Commonwealth Foundation, said on Wednesday. “We take these claims seriously and are committed to responding to them with care and transparency.”
The choice of blowzy, over-wrought prose, dodgy dialect (the extracts shared do not seem employ patois), derivative themes say more about how US-UK-EU publishing apparatus perceives anticolonial work than the actual work being produced by ‘global south’/minoritised writers https://t.co/Ffgmb8a9mG
— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) May 19, 2026
Farook said the foundation didn’t use AI detection software during judging because the competition accepted unpublished fiction and “to supply unpublished original work to an AI checker would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership”.
“When they submit stories to the Prize, writers accept our entry rules and guidelines,” Farook said. “These include confirming that their submission is their own original work. All shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this.”
doesn't seem like an one off. of the 5 stories that won, 3 appear to be primarily ai written according to pangram.... 🙄🙄 https://t.co/VCrcBisS10 pic.twitter.com/Zds7TwKZ1Q
— qt cache🪷 (@frontier_foid) May 18, 2026
“Until a sufficient tool or process to reliably detect the use of AI emerges that can also grapple with the challenges pertaining to working with unpublished fiction,” the director added, “the foundation and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize must operate on the principle of trust.”
Although only three of the stories – by DeMicoli, Aruparayil and Nazir – are currently subject to online scrutiny, Granta has since added a notice to all five winners online, saying that “there has been speculation that some of the stories may have been at least partially AI-generated” and that it’ll keep them online until the Commonwealth Foundation reaches “a definite conclusion”.
