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Earlier this year, Jamir Nazir, a retired Trinidadian civil servant with no public writing career to speak of, won both the regional and overall Commonwealth Short Story Prize for “ The Serpent in the Grove .” The story follows Vishnu, a Trinidadian man and alcoholic, who tries to kill his wife, Sita, in an attempt to escape his life.
Within days, the win sparked controversy, as readers, writers, and critics accused Nazir of using AI to write the story, citing evidence like its “heavily polished” prose, metaphor-rich text, and scores on AI detectors like Pangram. Soon, other winners were also accused of using AI. It ranks among the most public controversies about the use of AI in creative writing, highlighting the strange predicament of being unable to know, beyond a doubt, whether someone used AI. Nazir stayed mostly under the radar, but publicly denied the claims in a comment to a LinkedIn post by NDTV, an Indian news channel.
The Commonwealth Foundation opened an investigation and eventually stated that it had cleared Nazir and other winners of the accusations. Granta, a partner in the prize, publicly distanced itself from the situation and eventually cut ties with the Commonwealth Foundation.
After participating in the Commonwealth’s investigation and being announced as the contest’s overall winner, Nazir agreed to speak with me. We discussed his writing background, how the story came to him, the specific lines readers flagged as AI-like, what it felt like to win — and then be accused of using AI — and how the aftermath has changed the way he thinks about his own writing. We also spoke about his health: Nazir says he lives with diabetes and neuropathy, and is recovering from a kidney transplant and lymphoma, conditions that he says affected his writing process and contributed to the polished style many critics flagged.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
You won both the regional and overall Commonwealth Short Story Prize. What did that mean to you?
It meant a great deal, because as far as the literary world was concerned, I was an unknown author. I’d heard many stories from people who entered the competition and never heard anything back. Some people questioned how someone like me could appear out of nowhere and win.
For me, it was a tremendous honor, but I wasn’t shocked to win, to be honest with you. I told my wife and a couple of other people: “I will win this thing.” And the reason for that is: I have a scientific brain. My training has been in science, so I looked at the history of winning stories, tried to find the patterns the judges seemed to reward, and combined that with the creative part of me. I’ve always been writing, ever since I was a child, just not in public.
Perhaps the most joy it brought me was my mother’s reaction. She’s 82 in August. When she heard all the negative comments after the original winners were announced, she was very sad — she has always known me to be a high achiever, never any kind of trouble. When I was able to tell her I’d won the overall prize, that made me so happy. I just started to cry. That was my biggest reaction — seeing my mother happy again.
Do you remember which winning stories you read that were particularly influential?
The stories themselves weren’t important to me, at least not their specific names. I remember some of the authors, like a man from Guyana, but I don’t remember the stories. I was just trying to scan for what I consider trends and patterns and how they went about writing.
So you studied winning examples and wrote a story that mimicked those patterns, but in your creative voice? Is that a fair summary?
Yes, the story itself is different — it was like background research, like a literature review.
Where did the idea for “The Serpent in the Grove” come from?
It had been at the back of my mind for a long time. It goes back to my childhood. I used to walk from a rural area to primary school, past three rum shops near the cane fields. I’d hear the raucous noise in the evenings on my way home, people gathering after work, mostly from the sugarcane industry, which was controlled by the British. Tate & Lyle owned nearly all the plantations.
My father made it a practice to talk to us — my brother, sister, and me — about the scourge of alcohol, because my own grandfather was what you’d call a bad drunk. We learned how men who drank deprived their children of school, beat their wives. My father saw education as the way out of poverty. I saw kids come to school barefoot, without books, because their fathers had drunk away the money. That story stuck with me.
Once I started writing it, I visualized the entire thing playing back like on a television screen. I had to embellish and disguise some of the characters, because a lot of them are based on real people. After I pictured everything, I started putting it down.
People have pointed to specific lines or words as evidence that AI authored the story. For example, you write that the grove was “humming,” which is a verb that AI commonly uses. Why that word?
It came naturally to me. My father was an Indian singer, and the songs were very much part of our vocabulary growing up. When I was writing, it just seemed to fit. I know it’s maybe not a word a lot of people use in this context, but it came naturally.
You also wrote that a character, Zoongie, “had the kind of walking that made benches turn into men.” How did that line come about?
It’s not literal — think of the sirens in the Odyssey , irresistible to any man. Zoongie is based on a real person. In her own mind, she believed herself so attractive that she could turn anyone into a devotee. I used a bit of magical realism there, the way Salman Rushdie writes about people so beautiful they float into the air. Or Gabriel García Márquez, about, when he was killed, and the blood bled, he went around another village and then entered his mother’s village and called out and said, “Your son is dead.” Do you think that happened literally?
No, I understand that’s not literal.
I wanted to convey the power of Zoongie’s character. She is, in her own deluded mind, God’s gift to men. She imagined that she could have converted anyone to devotees, so the benches in the rum shops were transformed into these men.
He thought she was attractive, and she was to the rum shop men. Remember, when you’re drinking and totally intoxicated, you can see things in new ways. But she was attractive, too.
So, the benches are in the rum shop?
Yes, yes. When she was there early or cleaning up at night, and there were no men, she constantly needed that to justify herself.
And the line about the character Sita smiling “like sunrise over a sink”?
That one’s specific to how we lived. Our kitchen faced east, and my mother was a stickler for cleaning — we used car polish on the sink to keep it shiny. I remember the sunrise reflecting off it. That image stuck with me, and when I was writing, it came back. Like I said, the story was writing itself. I was just guided and put the words from the thoughts, from speech to text, and I thought it sounded good.
Some people have cited AI-detection tools as evidence against you. What’s your view of those tools?
There’s no way these tools are admissible in a court of law — which is the gold standard for determining whether something actually works — because they’re considered unreliable.
One of these tools flagged my prose as “too highly polished,” which is really just another way of saying a human couldn’t have written this well. I refuse to accept that. Who is a machine to tell me it has already taken over and that the rest of humanity now treats it as the authority on what humans are capable of?
The Commonwealth asked me if I’d published any writing before. I self-published a book of poetry on Amazon back in 2017. Poetry has always been my first love in writing. I grew up reading Pablo Neruda and a few others, and that’s what pulled me toward it.
Here’s the thing: I would have plenty of writing in these tools’ databases already. I’ve written hundreds, maybe thousands, of poems that I shared freely in several poetry groups on Facebook, just for people to enjoy. Meta would have scraped all of that — used it to train its own AI, likely sold it, too.
So it struck me: If an AI already has this much data on my writing style, then when it sees new writing from me, it doesn’t necessarily recognize “AI-generated” — it recognizes familiarity . My speculation is that it’s essentially saying, “I already have this in my database, so this must be AI,” when really it’s just recognizing me.
What about your writing do you think made people believe it was AI-generated?
My writing is slightly different. It has a musical ring to it. That came from my writing of poetry. I wasn’t even aware of it. I don’t think people are used to that in short story fiction. That’s one reason. And two is that my lines are highly polished, which makes the overall story highly polished, and I think that’s the thing: that a human writer cannot keep that degree of focus and accuracy.
The reason why it came out that way is because of my neuropathy, which is horrible pain. Sometimes my fingers twist and cramp up, so I used speech-to-text on an Android phone. Three, four inches maximum — that’s all I could see at a time in terms of lines, so I would turn it over and over and ensure all that I had was smooth because I wanted to win this thing, right? Pull up three, four lines again, and do the same. The micro details. I pay attention to these small pieces, and some of the parts, added together, were highly polished.
Now I have a tablet, and I can see more lines. We will see if it helps or hurts me.
The Commonwealth ran an internal investigation into the allegations made against you and other writers. What did the Commonwealth’s investigation actually involve?
It was an extensive interrogation, and at times, I got upset. It was a good thing for my wife, who told me, ”Just do the thing for the people.” Both parties — Granta and Commonwealth — had questions. Even the editor of Granta got involved.
I had to submit my background and answer the same questions you asked me: How did I come up with the idea of the story? Then I submitted a character profile of Vishnu, and I submitted the files with several drafts of the story. For example, I sent a version I wrote in the local dialect. And I sent one where Vishnu packed up all his belongings and went to the capital and escaped into a new world and was never heard from again. I felt Sita was too pure a character, so I tried one version where I engaged her in an affair with the shopkeeper’s son.
Someone asked why the different versions seemed unrelated, and I had to explain they were intended to be unrelated. Then I did a technical analysis to show the characters were the same, the plot to kill Sita was the same — Vishnu’s idea to escape his life by murdering his wife and running away, imagining his glorious time with Zoongie.
But in the end, I think Commonwealth writers did a good job without leaning on an AI detector to decide. Still, I didn’t like it. Honestly, it felt intrusive.
Has the accusation changed how you write now?
Yes. I’m writing a historical fiction book about my grandfather’s life in India, and I find myself very wary — worried it will kill the natural creativity, second-guessing whether something will be flagged. It’s affected me psychologically. I know I shouldn’t let it bother me, but being human, I can’t help it. It’s not a good feeling.
How’d it make you feel?
As I said, with the questions and what I would call interrogation, it upset me. What regrets really kill me? My mother was listening to all of this stuff, hearing what was happening from the interviews, especially from social media and the local newspaper. That broke me, seeing how she reacted. I’m getting angry now, forgive me, reliving the experience. It wasn’t good at all.
What are your personal opinions on AI?
It’s a good research tool, but you have to validate everything it gives you, because it hallucinates. I wouldn’t use it primarily because I’ve always been an excellent writer. Technical writer, memos, emails, whatever. I helped a lot of people, right? With essays and so on. Letters, even. And I didn’t need to do any research with this, because all of this was in my head.
I think AI is something that will evolve eventually. The thing is, people always look for these topics to argue about on social media. A lot of people just copy this thing, this XYZ sentence, and everyone regurgitates it. I would love to interview a bunch of them and ask them, “What do you mean by this?” I’m sure they don’t know, but they’re on the bandwagon. Social media has started to destroy the fabric of our society, the way we communicate and accuse people, all over, not only in this. AI is the flavor now.
It will become totally natural in a couple of years. A lot of people are using it now, just jumping on this bandwagon. If we would properly investigate, 99% are trying to use AI to polish their comments or check. It’s “bacchanal,” as we say in Trinidad. I think it will evolve when it gets accepted by the writing community.
Do you think it is ever OK to use AI in writing?
I don’t need it for my own creative writing — my poems, my stories — because that material has been living in me since I was a small child. If I were writing something more scientific or technical, I could see it playing a bigger role. But creativity — AI doesn’t have a soul. Not yet, and not in my lifetime, as far as I’m concerned.
At the same time, I don’t think AI is a demon. I see real value in it: in medicine, in diagnosing disease, in agriculture, in climate work. They are consistent, and they never get tired. What frightens me is AI in weapons systems. For example, a number of years ago, a Russian general who was monitoring the system detected that the U.S. had launched nukes, but it was a false positive. Now, if that was AI, the response would have been what? Immediately retaliate? You know what he did? He stopped. Because he felt there was something wrong. He used his instinct. I am afraid that all of these military weapons are going to be completely automated to AI.
That’s the AI that you, the public, me, should all be speaking about. What the hell — sorry — is the harm of AI in writing? We are not affecting any life, limb, or anything.
To be clear, did you use AI in any part of your writing of this story?
Nothing in the story.
No brainstorming or outlining? You didn’t use it at all?
No, no, no. The story was there. It wrote itself.
Looking back, is there anything you want to add about how this affected you?
My biggest concern now is for budding writers. I’ve heard several people now say they are not going to participate in this competition for fear of the same kind of attack. We may have a brilliant writer, like a Steinbeck or a Walcott, maybe the Commonwealth would have launched them. They’re so scared now, and I understand why, going through this thing myself. But I do think the competition is a great thing for the region, and we need to reassure young writers.
I don’t think I ever would have entered that competition if I knew. Here I was, very sick, retired from active work. And I just saw this ad pop up on Facebook and decided to enter my story, and look what it has done. The biggest blow is what it did to my mother and the rest of my family, friends, other people. I live on a small island. It was highly embarrassing. People believe what they read in print and on TV and social media. People close to you go with the other narratives.
This article He won a major short story prize. Then he was accused of using AI. is featured on Big Think .
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