New scandal in the literary world: a book written with AI has won a literary prize of 20,000 euros

BarcelonaThis Friday, the winning work of the first Almadía - Ventosa Arrufat International Short Novel Prize, endowed with 20,000 euros, for which 2,204 manuscripts were submitted, was to be presented in Madrid. The jury, made up of three renowned authors, Cristina Rivera Garza, Selva Almada, and Mónica Ojeda, had chosen Donde el agua trabaja, the first novel by the Peruvian lawyer David Silva Rojas (Ica, 1981).

The publisher has decided to suspend the presentation and the subsequent book tour after the newspaper El País made it public that, after running the text through Pangram, one of the most highly rated detectors for machine-generated text, the program reached the conclusion that Donde el agua trabaja "is 99% written using artificial intelligence." The publisher has expressed being "surprised" by the results of the investigation and has asked for time to be able to speak with the author about this very "complex" issue, although for the moment it has canceled the presentation events for the novel.

The case of Donde el agua trabaja, the first of its kind recorded in the Spanish language, adds to two recent literary scandals related to the use of artificial intelligence. The first starred in May one of the winners of the 2026 Commonwealth prizes, endowed with 2,500 pounds —about 2,850 euros—, Jamir Nazir, who won with the story The serpent in the grove [The snake in the forest]. The controversy began when one of the first readers of the story, available online at Granta, thought to run it through Pangram, and the result was revealing: it claimed that "100% of the text was the work of AI." The suspicion spread rapidly through social networks like X and Reddit. Some users noted that Nazir's winning story was full of grammatical structures typical of artificial intelligence language models, questioned the expertise of the jury that had chosen the narrative, and commented, with irony, that finally AI had won its first literary prize.

This autumn, one of the most prominent novelties of the French literary season also opened a heated debate about its authorship. It was C'était ça ou mourir, the third novel by the Haitian-born writer Thélyson Orélien, published by Grasset. In the month of September, an anonymous X account denounced that the work had been written almost entirely through artificial intelligence, as it had been able to verify through the Pangram program. The author denied the accusations, but after the Goncourt Academy removed the novel from the finalists aspiring to receive the award, he decided to interrupt the promotional tour to return to Canada, the country where he has lived for decades and where he first published C'était ça ou mourir, with the publisher Boréal. This same week, Boréal has formalized its split with Orélien after analyzing the book and verifying that there were "traces of artificial intelligence markers in the metadata of his work documents": besides not reprinting the novel anymore, the publisher will not publish any more of the author's work.