AI is Writing Prize-Winning Fiction

What is the Commonwealth Prize?

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is a prestigious worldwide award for authors across the Commonwealth. Stakes are high: regional winners take home roughly $3350 USD, while the overall winner takes home about $6700 USD.

On May 18th, two days after the 2026 regional winners were announced, writer Nabeel S. Qureshi tweeted about how AI-generated one of the winning stories, The Serpent in the Grove by Jamir Nazir, seemed. @allgarbled then ran the story through Pangram, where it was flagged as 100% AI-generated.

Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).

"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.

A major milestone for AI, at any rate...@GrantaMag https://t.co/BWGBpRasNz pic.twitter.com/U6jWejprFv

— Nabeel S. Qureshi (@nabeelqu) May 18, 2026

This raised a larger question: how many prize-winning stories are actually using AI?

Examining AI Use in Commonwealth Prize Winners

The Commonwealth Foundation hosts an archive of every regional story winner dating back to 2012. We ran these stories through Pangram and found that Nazir was not alone in their use of AI: one of the five 2025 regional winners and three of the five 2026 regional winners showed strong signs of AI usage in their writing.

The stories flagged as using AI include:

• Descend by Chanel Sutherland (2025 Overall Winner, Canada / Saint Vincent and the Grenadines)
• The Serpent in the Grove by Jamir Nazir (2026, Trinidad and Tobago)
• The Bastion's Shadow by John Edward DeMicoli (2026, Malta)
• Mehendi Nights by Sharon Aruparayil (2026, India)

Not only did Pangram catch three of the five authors from 2026, but the overall winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Sutherland's Descend was flagged by Pangram as having an AI fraction of 88%, indicating that we believe that the document is primarily AI-generated with some human-written content.