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When Jamir Nazir’s short story “The Serpent in the Grove,” winner of the prestigious 2026 Commonwealth Prize, first set off accusations that it had been generated with artificial intelligence, some commenters speculated that Nazir himself, along with two other finalists, was an A.I. fabrication. The story, about a farmer’s failed plot to kill his wife, was reportedly flagged by the A.I. detection program Pangram as completely artificial, and even a circulating headshot of Nazir’s was taken as evidence that he was not a real person. The latter, thankfully, does not appear to be the case, as Nazir has granted some interviews recently, including a revealing conversation in the Atlantic with staff writer Will Oremus.
What makes this interview so diverting is its complete failure to restore confidence in Nazir’s claims to have written “The Serpent in the Grove”—which can be read in Granta magazine, along with an addendum regarding the controversy—entirely on his own. While maintaining that he uses A.I. for “research” alone, Nazir launches into a surprising, if familiar, defense of the tool, comparing it to such “machine assistants” as typewriters and word processors, which he insists were initially met with such objections as “You’re supposed to use a quill or your fountain pen.” (As someone who remembers the transition from typewriters to word processors, I don’t recall anything of the kind.) “A lot of people use it,” Nazir tells Oremus, though he says he would not recommend it to anyone entering a literary contest, at least not for the next two or three years, until everyone gets used to the idea.
Other intriguing moments in the interview include Nazir’s citing of the Nobel Prize–winning Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott as a major influence on his work—followed by his inability to name or describe any of Walcott’s poems, which he refers to as “stories.” (Walcott did not write prose fiction.) Nazir blames his forgetfulness on “brain fog,” a result of his treatment for both Type 1 diabetes and cancer. Neuropathy, he says, makes it difficult for him to sit in a chair and use a keyboard, so he dictates his work to his Android phone, and edits it there as well.
Neuropathy can be a terrible and debilitating symptom, but when Nazir goes on to assert that he did not need A.I. to generate “The Serpent in the Grove” because “I lived it,” he begins to come across as playing a series of health- and identity-related cards designed to divert criticism to sympathy. As at least one critic has pointed out, “The Serpent in the Grove” dispenses an assortment of hoary clichés about Caribbean people as simple villagers with the most rudimentary of personalities, desires, and motivations, a striking contrast with the technology-conversant Nazir. It resembles nothing so much as, in the words of critic Lina Abushouk, what readers from an “elite, metropolitan literary institution” expect of the literature of the Caribbean, a region that has in fact produced voices as distinctive and sophisticated as Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, and Marlon James.
Much has been made of several nonsensical lines in “The Serpent in the Grove,” particularly Nazir’s description of the village hottie, Zoongie. (Yes, Zoongie: “Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.”) Zoongie reportedly has “the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Nazir defended this sentence to the Times of India as an example of “magical realism. Think Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s a literary technique,” before going on to explain that the transformation of benches into men occurs only in Zoongie’s imagination, which would make it not magical realism at all.
“Forget A.I. for a minute,” Marlon James posted on Facebook in May, after the scandal first shook the literary world. “A story won an International Competition with a line like this: ‘The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.’ ” Nazir justified this by explaining that the reference came “directly from my childhood,” when his mother polished the kitchen sink until it reflected the sun streaming in from an east-facing window. “It’s from my lived experience,” he protested to the Times of India. This assertion becomes the reductio ad absurdum of such claims: No matter how meaningless a simile is to anyone who didn’t grow up with such a sink, mother, or window, it must have merit simply because the author experienced it personally.
But while “The Serpent in the Grove” is indeed the sort of dull, metaphor-clotted text that passes for a literary achievement in some circles, I find that the more I read about Nazir, the less peevish the whole affair makes me. While nothing that he writes is of much interest, Nazir himself is shaping up to be an oddly appealing character. He’s a cultural chancer who has deployed an assortment of identity markers both to advance himself as a literary figure and to defend himself from the sort of cruel detractor who might mock him for not being able to name a poem by his allegedly favorite writer. He can name-check Pablo Neruda (describing him to Oremus as “a guy known as Pablo Neruda from Chile”) and Salman Rushdie. He can talk about growing up in a “rural sugarcane village in Trinidad,” and how the ravages of alcoholism that he witnessed there became the seed for his story (in which alcohol plays, at most, a minor role).
Nazir resembles a 21st-century version of the tragicomic characters created by his fellow Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul. He is a striver, an outsider whose ambitions—success in the realm of literary fiction, in Nazir’s case—are all the more poignant for being so modest, like those of Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas. He has adopted the strategic moves that so often prove effective in the circles of literary foundations and nonprofits, though he has not quite mastered them. He can’t contain his enthusiasm for the glittering technology he’s accused of consorting with, even though he knows he shouldn’t talk about it to interviewers. Nazir’s bids to make it in a world dominated by unspoken and often inscrutable codes of behavior and status are weirdly relatable. All the while, through the gaps in the image of himself that Nazir tries to present can be glimpsed a character far more fascinating and engaging than the cardboard villagers in “The Serpent in the Grove.” If only this were the lived experience he’d chosen to write about, he’d have found a reader in me.
