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

Simbarashe Kundizeza, the Zimbabwean author and winner of the prestigious 2026 Caine prize for African writers, has denied using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write his prize-winning short story “The Blue Fighter.” His name was recently dragged by Atlantic journalist Vauhini Vara, who found the story “maudlin and full of tired tropes.”

Five days after Kundizeza’s book bagged the title, which awards around $13,000, on October 11, The Atlantic published an article titled, “Yet Another Literary Prizewinner Seems to Be AI” that thinks “that this narrator has all the personality of a chatbot,” and it might not be coincidental.

Vara wrote that she had run the whole story through Pangram, an AI-detection software. “The AI detector Pangram flags almost the entire story as AI-generated,” She wrote. As per her, the only exception was an epigraph from an unpublished poem by the South African writer Vangile Gantsho.


She “was struck by the proliferation of language that is common in AI-produced writing: the not x, but y sentence constructions; the glut of metaphors; the platitudinous aphorisms”.

Kundizeza, who is pretty consistent in sharing his achievements on X, responded with a lengthy statement on X: “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.”

As per Kundizeza, the associate editor of African Writer Magazine The Blue Fighter “did not appear out of nowhere; it has a concrete, documented history.”

He adds that the genesis was during his “LOATAD Black Atlantic Residency in Ghana. While there‚ I read a poem by vangile gantsho titled “my father's hands․”

“I look forward to continuing to work with the Caine prize team, and to celebrating this recognition with the people who helped bring this story into the world. Most importantly, I will continue to write,” he concluded.

After the controversy, the Caine Prize said in a statement that they are reviewing whether Kundizeza had used AI or not. It said: “When such claims are made, it is our responsibility to look into them. We aim to do this by taking a human-centred approach, ensuring that writers are supported and cared for during the process.”

A few weeks back, the Quebec author Thélyson Orélien’s novel C’était Ça Ou Mourir (It Was That or Die) was removed from France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt’s list, after it was flagged for being AI.