Zimbabwean author Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using artificial intelligence (AI) to write his short story, The Blue Fighter , which won the 2026 Caine Pri...
Zimbabwean author Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using artificial intelligence (AI) to write his short story, The Blue Fighter, which won the 2026 Caine Prize for African Writing, following allegations published by US magazine The Atlantic that the work was entirely AI-generated.
Kundizeza won the £10,000 (about US$13,000) literary award a week before the allegations emerged. The controversy followed an article by Vauhini Vara, titled Yet Another Prizewinner Seems to Be AI, which reported that AI-detection software Pangram had classified the story as entirely generated by artificial intelligence.
In response, Kundizeza rejected the allegation in a statement posted on X. “For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote The Blue Fighter,” he said.
The story follows a boy whose family experiences financial difficulties. Its publication in The Atlantic has sparked debate among writers, publishers and readers about the reliability of AI-detection tools and the treatment of African writers facing accusations of using artificial intelligence.
Caine Prize chair Ellah Wakatama criticised The Atlantic for publishing the allegations before a full investigation had been completed. Speaking on the BBC’s Front Row programme, she said the magazine should have carried out further checks alongside the software assessment before publishing the claims.
“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 programme.
The chair of the Caine Prize’s board of trustees said she was contacted on Friday about the allegation, while Vara’s article was published on Sunday. Wakatama said the prize organisers had begun an internal investigation and were in discussions with the judges and The Shallow Tales Review, which first published The Blue Fighter in 2025.
As part of the investigation, Kundizeza is expected to submit documentation showing the development of the story, including its various drafts. In his statement, the author said he had a “concrete, documented history” of the story’s inspiration and outlined the chronology of its development.
Wakatama explained that entries for the Caine Prize are previously published works and are not routinely checked for AI use. Writers are instead required to confirm that their submissions are original. She said she was not opposed to using AI tools to examine entries but objected to relying on them as the final authority in determining whether a work was written by a human.
She also questioned whether Pangram was sufficiently tested to be used as the deciding factor in such cases. Wakatama said she was uncomfortable with writers, particularly Black writers, becoming the testing ground for technology that she described as still being in an early stage of development.
The controversy has also raised concerns among African writers about whether AI-related allegations are being directed disproportionately at non-white authors. Wale Lawal, founder of Nigerian magazine The Republic, criticised The Atlantic article on social media, describing it as “crazy, racist and wildly unethical”.
Zimbabwean writer Joe Ruzvidzo, whose novel Welcome to Anywhere was published last year, expressed support for Kundizeza and called for resistance to what he described as “this literary stop-and-frisk”. Nigerian publisher Modupe Daramola also questioned how allegations of AI use were being applied to Black and African writers.
“There’s something incredibly sinister about this,” Daramola, publisher of Noisy Streetss Limited, wrote on X. She also questioned the reliance on Pangram, noting that the software itself uses artificial intelligence.
Vara defended her reporting, saying her concerns about Silicon Valley were “well founded and reasonable”. She said Pangram’s internal research indicated that its assessments were rarely wrong, while acknowledging that AI-detection products could not achieve complete accuracy.
Research has shown that AI detectors can incorrectly classify human-written material as AI-generated. Vara acknowledged that any AI-detection product, including Pangram, was “not going to be 100% accurate”.
Her article also referred to a paper by researchers at the Free University of Brussels. According to the article, the study found no cases in which Pangram and two other AI-detection tools incorrectly assessed English-language writing by non-native speakers. However, the study advised that such tools should be treated as an initial warning that requires further investigation rather than conclusive proof.
Speaking to the BBC, Vara said she had also relied on her own judgment when assessing the story. She said other previous Caine Prize-winning stories she had tested using Pangram were classified as entirely human-written.
Vara also said she had tested an earlier story by Kundizeza, published in 2021, and the software had classified it as entirely human-written. She said the earlier work differed significantly in tone from The Blue Fighter, raising questions for her about whether both stories had been written by the same person.
Kundizeza rejected that reasoning, arguing that writers can develop their skills and work in different styles and genres over time. He said suggesting otherwise showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the writing process, particularly after five or more years of development.
Vara also pointed to sentence structures contrasting two ideas, such as “X but Y”, which she said were common in AI-generated writing. She cited a description of the mother in The Blue Fighter: “Not with anger, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had known all along this moment would come.” She said the story’s use of metaphors also contributed to her concerns.
Kundizeza had previously discussed the inspiration behind the story with the BBC the day after receiving the award. He said the idea developed after he heard South African poet Vangile Gantsho read a poem at an event in Ghana the previous year. The poem concerned her father’s interest in building fish tanks.
The Zimbabwean author said he combined that inspiration with fictionalised details from his own life around 2002, when the country’s economic difficulties began. He explained that his father, like the father in the story, had worked as an accountant before leaving his job to grow tomatoes.
“Much like the father in the story, my own dad… was an accountant, but he quit his job to grow tomatoes. So it kind of touches on both of our fathers,” he told BBC Newsday.
The allegations come amid other disputes over the use of AI in literary competitions. Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize despite allegations that he had used AI. Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien also withdrew from France’s Goncourt literary award following allegations that he had used AI for his first novel, which he denied.
Kundizeza said he was encouraged by messages of support from fellow writers and readers following the controversy. In his statement on X, he ended by reaffirming his commitment to his work, saying: “Most importantly, I will continue to write.”
The Caine Prize investigation remains focused on examining the available documentation and discussing the allegations with the relevant parties. The dispute has placed renewed attention on how AI-detection software is used in literary assessments and the need to distinguish software-generated assessments from established evidence of authorship.
