In the early hours of Sunday, May 17th 2026, I stumbled on a tweet by Nigerian literary critic and essayist, Chimezie Chike, accusing Jamir Nazir, the newly minted 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner (Caribbean Region), of winning the coveted prize with a story like this. A little digging into the comments has Chimezie and others positing that Jamir’s story, “The Serpent in the Grove,” was a terrible read, wrought with tedious metaphors, and, most importantly, AI-generated.
The AI accusations were palpable because the “giveaways,” “icks,” and “invitations” were sentence structures and literary devices that I have grown to love as a reader and have, many a time, incorporated in my own writing. There was no room for “what ifs,” no consideration that Large Language Models (LLMs) do not exist in a vacuum and were (and are still) trained using works from unconsenting writers. To see things for myself, I decided to read the story. It was a beautiful story, read a bit overwritten and melodramatic in some points but this was a style of writing I am used to, written by someone Toni Morrison would describe as a person who does language.
Mr. Nazir’s story echoes the voices of Asian and Caribbean literary canons. There are noticeable influences from writers such as Arundhati Roy and Jamaica Kincaid. It has the beautiful strangeness I always look forward to in the stories of previous Asian/Caribbean regional winners of the prize. Sharma Taylor, the Caribbean judge for this year’s prize, also echoes my thoughts in her citation of Mr. Nazir’s story; “polished and confident, with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line.”
