LONDON (The Thursday Times) — The Caine Prize for African Writing has confirmed Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza as this year’s winner after a review found no evidence that he used generative artificial intelligence to write his story, the prize said on Wednesday.
“From our detailed investigation, we feel the evidence is clear: The Blue Fighter was human written,” Ellah Wakatama, chair of the prize’s board of trustees, said in a video statement. The award is worth £10,000, about $13,000.
The review followed a US magazine article last month by journalist Vauhini Vara, who said the AI-detection tool Pangram had rated the story as entirely machine-written. Kundizeza denied the allegation.
How the prize checked
The prize said it interviewed the author, this year’s judges, and the Shallow Tales Review, where the story was first published, and had an independent digital forensic investigator analyse the metadata of his drafts.
Kundizeza, who lives in Harare, has said the story, about a boy whose family falls on hard times, was inspired by a poem by the South African poet Vangile Gantsho about her father’s obsession with building fish tanks. He wove it with fictionalised details from his own life around 2002, when Zimbabwe’s economic troubles began.
A wider row over AI and prizes
The case is one of several this year. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize went to Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir despite allegations that he had used AI, and Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien withdrew from France’s Prix Goncourt over similar claims, which he denies.
The accusation against Kundizeza drew a backlash on social media, where some African writers suggested such claims were being aimed mainly at writers who are not white.
