Granta cuts ties with Commonwealth Short Story Prize over winning story AI authorship row

Granta, one of literary publishing’s most storied names, has severed its long-running partnership with the Commonwealth Short Story Prize following weeks of controversy over whether this year’s Caribbean regional winner was written, at least in part, by artificial intelligence.

The dispute centres on “The Serpent in the Grove”, a story by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir that follows a struggling farmer whose obsession with another woman leads him to plot against his wife, only for the scheme to unravel near a haunted well. The story was selected from the Caribbean region and had been praised by judging chair Louise Doughty before questions about its origins began circulating online.

How the controversy started

The story emerged as the Caribbean finalist from a pool of 7,806 entries, selected by a panel that included Caribbean judge Sharma Taylor. But Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who studies AI’s workplace effects, flagged the piece in a widely shared social media thread after running it through Pangram, a detection tool its maker says is highly accurate at spotting machine-generated text.

Jenna Russel, a research scientist at Pangram, went further, saying three of this year’s five regional winners appeared to be partly or wholly AI-generated, including Nazir’s story. Close readers pointed to the text’s heavy use of parallel phrasing, three-part lists and other rhetorical patterns often associated with large language model output.

Compounding the suspicion, Nazir himself proved difficult to verify. Reports noted a thin public record for a writer described in his own biography as a Trinidadian author of East Indian heritage exploring Caribbean and diaspora themes, with little published work beyond a self-released poetry collection and a professional online…