‘VAR Complete’: Zimbabwean author Simbarashe Kundizeza reacts after being cleared of using AI to write prize-winning story

Simbarashe Kundizeza, the Zimbabwean author accused of writing a prize-winning short story with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), has reacted after being cleared of the charge. The prestigious Caine Prize for African Writers concluded after a month-long investigation on Wednesday, 11 November, that his entry was “human-written”.

A day after, he posted a symbolic image with the message “VAR Complete” from a football match’s screen.



Kundzeiza’s story, The Blue Fighter, was announced as the winner of the £10,000 prize on October 6, and it explores a boy's observations of his family’s hard times around 2002, during the onset of Zimbabwe's economic difficulties.

On October 11, Canadian-American author Vauhini Vara published an article titled “Yet another literary prize winner seems to be AI” in The Atlantic, in which she said AI-detection software Pangram had deemed the story to be “almost the entire story as AI-generated.”

After the investigation, Ellah Wakatama, the Caine Prize chair, said in a statement, “we feel the evidence is clear: The Blue Fighter was human-written. We now look forward to awarding and celebrating Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza.”

She added: “When concerns were raised, we have a duty as an organisation to look at them carefully and fairly.”

Also Read: Zimbabwean author who reportedly used AI to write a short story that bagged $13,000 Caine prize rejects allegation

In the press statement, she also acknowledged that “questions raised by AI are not going away, we hope the steps we are announcing today will help writers, publishers and judges approach them with confidence and consideration for the people at the heart of such claims.”

Kundizeza, who earlier had rejected the claim using AI to write the story. “For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote ‘The Blue Fighter.’ I did not use generative AI to write it. It is entirely my own work,” he said in an X post at the time.


“It was not necessary in the first place, I am happy to put all this behind me and continue with my writing journey,” he reacted, as quoted by the Guardian.

In recent times, English author Anthony Horowitz has admitted to using AI platforms like ChatGPT “all the time” in his writing process. “I feel nervous about it, because, is it cheating? I feel a bit like it’s cheating in a school exam,” the Independent quoted in May this year.

Polish Nobel Prize-winning writer Olga Tokarczuk, sparked a major literary controversy in May 2026 after revealing she uses a premium AI chatbot during her creative process.

“I make use of artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world - I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts,” she wrote in Lithub on May 19.

However, she later clarified that she uses it strictly for research rather than writing.

“None of my texts, including the novel that will appear in Polish this fall, has been written with the help of artificial intelligence - except for using it as a tool for faster preliminary research,” she said at the time.