The Story That Won a Granta Prize Was Very Likely Written by AI

A question to start: can a text win a literary prize if no human wrote it?

The Commonwealth Foundation, which awards short story prizes in partnership with Granta, has now supplied an answer, however inadvertently: apparently yes, provided no one catches it in time.

“The Serpent in the Grove,” entered by Jamir Nazir as a Caribbean regional finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, initially received the organisation’s praise. Then came Pangram, an AI-writing detection tool that its developers claim operates with 99% accuracy. Its verdict on the story: 100% red flags. The parallel constructions, epistrophe, and lists of three that large language models favour appeared throughout. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick dissected the text publicly on Bluesky. The Commonwealth Foundation announced it “will review its selection process.” So did Granta.

Jamir Nazir exists online with the minimal footprint of someone who may not fully exist at all: a LinkedIn profile describing him as an “AI evangelist,” a self-published inspirational poetry collection from 2018, and little else.

Before reaching for easy outrage: what interests me isn’t the question of whether Nazir “cheated” — that’s for organisers and rulebooks. It’s the stranger question underneath: what does it mean that an AI could write a text that human judges read, evaluated, and shortlisted? This isn’t a machine fooling a detection algorithm. It fooled careful readers. People whose job is to read carefully.

Borges — high-culture reference, as promised — wrote in 1941 about a man who rewrote the Quixote word for word, and that act was considered radically original. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” the author is a ghost whose identity is secondary to the text. Now the question inverts: what happens when the text exists but the author is dispensable, or nonexistent?

The system failed. Not because AI writes well — it does, technically — but because nobody had the tools or protocols to suspect it. Literary magazines need to catch up, and fast, before their prize lists fill with LinkedIn-profile ghosts. In the meantime: read the best human short story writers you can find. The weirdest, the most alive, the ones you could never mistake for an algorithm because their voice is too much their own to be average.