Scandal in the literary world: an artificial intelligence could have won the Commonwealth prize
Jamir Nazir has received 2,850 euros for a narration suspected of having been artificially created and retouched
BarcelonaUntil a few hours ago, the name Jamir Nazir had been associated above all with his "love for poetry", a fact that has led him to write verses about the "landscapes, stories and emotional rhythms" of the island of Trinidad, where he grew up and where he still lives, as we can read in the biography of the prestigious magazine Granta. Nazir is interested in "exploring the cultural intersections between the Caribbean and the Indian diaspora", a theme that inspired the story The serpent in the grove [The serpent in the forest], with which he has won one of the Commonwealth 2026 prizes, endowed with 2,500 pounds – about 2,850 euros – to which almost 8,000 narratives had been submitted.
The controversy began when one of the first readers of the story, available online in Granta, decided to put it into Pangram, a program that allows verifying if the analyzed content has been created by a human intelligence, if it has plagiarized other texts or if it has been generated through artificial intelligence. The result was revealing: it assured that "100% of the text was the work of AI".
Suspicion quickly spread across social media platforms like X and Reddit. Some users pointed out that Jamir 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, ironically, that AI had finally won its first literary award. It has also been noted that Nazir's own portrait is artificially generated and retouched.
Although most literary awards in the world specify that the texts submitted cannot have been written or worked on through AI, The Serpent in the Forest, by Jamir Nazir, is not the first work suspected of having been artificially created that has been well-received by a jury. There are several precedents, such as Land of Memories, which won the second Jiangsu Science Fiction Award in 2023 and was created and improved through an AI, although it was signed by Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University. ChatGPT also intervened in the creation of The Tower of Compassion of Tokyo, with which Rie Kudan won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2024, although the author admitted that she had only used it "in 5% of the text". In Catalan, the most controversial recent case regarding the authorship of a text has been the Ciutat de Palma poetry prize 2023, which was won by Ecogrames, by Jorge Fernández. When the author collected the award, endowed with 12,000 euros, he did not utter a single word in Catalan, and shortly afterwards admitted that he had had the book translated into Catalan because it was "a new model for publishing" and to reach readers "through some channel".
While the Commonwealth Foundation reviews the selection process for the five winners in the regional categories, including Jamir Nazir's story, suspicions are growing about the human authorship of the stories of two of the other winners, signed by the Maltese John Edward DeMicoli and the Indian Sharon Aruparayil. The jury will have to decide which of the five regional winners to award the Commonwealth prize, endowed with 5,700 euros. For now, the authorship of the work of two of the candidates – those of South African Lisa-Anne Julien and New Zealander Holly Ann Miller – has not been questioned.
Founded in 2012, the Commonwealth Prizes have boosted the literary careers of voices such as Ireland's Lucy Caldwell, Nigeria's Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Canada's Eliza Robertson.
