A week after winning the £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing, Zimbabwean author Simbarashe Kundizeza rejected claims that his short story, The Blue Fighter, was written by artificial intelligence. The Atlantic published an article citing AI-detection software Pangram, which reportedly flagged the story as entirely AI-generated. Kundizeza responded on X with a brief statement: “For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote The Blue Fighter.”
The Atlantic’s article, titled “Yet Another Prizewinner Seems to Be AI,” was published on Sunday and raised questions about the originality of Kundizeza’s work. It quoted Ellah Wakatama, chair of the Caine Prize, who said she was shocked the magazine had not waited for a full investigation before publishing. “I do wish The Atlantic had spent more time investigating this so that, alongside Pangram, they did have evidence of real human investigation of it before tainting the prize and tainting this winner,” Wakatama told the BBC’s Front Row programme.
The controversy comes amid a series of disputes over literary awards and AI use. Earlier this year, Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir faced similar accusations after winning the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien withdrew from France’s Goncourt prize amid AI allegations he denies.
Vauhini Vara, the author of the article in The Atlantic, defended her caution about Silicon Valley’s influence on literature. She cited internal research from Pangram suggesting its AI detection is rarely wrong. But the backlash was swift. Nigerian publisher Modupe Daramola criticised the accusations as disproportionately aimed at Black and African writers, calling the situation “incredibly sinister.” Nigerian journalist Wale Lawal described The Atlantic’s article as “crazy, racist and wildly unethical.” Zimbabwean author Joe Ruzvidzo, whose novel Welcome to Anywhere was published last year, said he supported Kundizeza and called for resistance to what he described as “literary stop-and-frisk.”
Wakatama said the Caine Prize board had opened an internal investigation and was in contact with Kundizeza, who would submit documentation including drafts of the story. The Blue Fighter was first published in 2025 by The Shallow Tales Review. Wakatama, also editor-at-large at Canongate Books, explained that the prize does not currently check entries for AI but relies on writers’ assurances of originality. She said she was not opposed to AI detection but opposed its use as a final judge in this case. “I am not happy for the work of writers, and in this case especially black writers, to form the testing ground for something that is at best still rough and ready,” she told the BBC.
In response to Vara’s suggestion that Kundizeza’s style had shifted dramatically between stories, Kundizeza wrote on X: “To suggest that a writer cannot write in different styles or genres, or improve his writing substantially after five or more years fundamentally misunderstands the craft of writing.”
Vara pointed out that The Blue Fighter contained frequent sentence constructions using “X but Y,” which she identified as common in AI-generated texts. She quoted a line describing a mother’s character: “Not with anger, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had known all along this moment would come.” Vara also noted the story’s metaphors, which she said are prevalent in AI-generated writing.
The Blue Fighter centres on a boy in a family struggling through hard times. Kundizeza said he drew inspiration from a poem by South African poet Vangile Gantsho, heard at an event in Ghana last year. The poem was about her father’s obsession with building fish tanks. Kundizeza combined this with elements from his own life around 2002, when Zimbabwe’s economic crisis began. “Much like the father in the story, my own dad… was an accountant, but he quit his job to grow tomatoes,” Kundizeza told the BBC the day after winning the prize.
Pangram’s AI detection is not infallible. A recent study by researchers at the Free University of Brussels found zero cases of false positives for Pangram and two other AI detectors when analysing English-language writing by non-native speakers. The paper stressed these tools should be seen as initial flags, not definitive proof. Vara said she also used her judgment in the investigation and that all previous Caine Prize winners’ stories she tested came out as 100% human.
The Caine Prize’s investigation continues while African writers and publishers debate how AI accusations are affecting their community. Kundizeza’s denial and the ongoing scrutiny of AI detection in literature point to unresolved tensions over technology’s role in creative work.
According to Joy Online.
