The Caine Prize for African Writing has reaffirmed Zimbabwean author Simbarashe Stein Kundizeza as the winner of its 2026 edition after an investigation found no evidence that his prize-winning short story, The Blue Fighter, was written using artificial intelligence.
The decision followed allegations published in The Atlantic by American writer Vauhini Vara, who questioned the originality of Kundizeza's work, suggesting that it might have been generated by AI.
Kundizeza won the prestigious literary award, which carries a £10,000 cash prize, for The Blue Fighter.
In an announcement on Wednesday, the Caine Prize said its Board of Trustees had completed an internal review of the allegations and found sufficient evidence to establish that the story was human-written.
The board's chair, Ellah Wakatama, said the investigation began on October 11 following the publication of Vara's article, titled “Yet Another Literary Prizewinner Seems to Be AI”.
The article had described the winning entry as containing several warning signs of AI-generated writing, relying partly on an assessment by Pangram, an artificial intelligence detection platform.
Wakatama said the prize organisers considered it necessary to investigate the claims fairly, given the potential implications for the author and the integrity of the award.
She explained that the review involved interviews with Kundizeza, the 2026 judging panel and Shallow Tales Review, the publication that first featured the story.
Independent experts also examined metadata from the writer's drafts as part of the process.
“The evidence is clear: The Blue Fighter was human-written,” Wakatama said, confirming that the award would not be withdrawn.
She added that the organisation would proceed with plans to celebrate Kundizeza as the 2026 winner before the end of the year.
The author had strongly denied the allegations before the conclusion of the investigation.
In a statement posted on his X account on October 13, Kundizeza insisted that he wrote the story without using generative AI.
“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.
He also provided an account of the story's creative origins, explaining that it was inspired by a poem, My Father's Hand, written by Vangile Gantsho.
Kundizeza said he encountered the poem during a writing residency in Ghana and drew inspiration from it to explore his family's experiences in Zimbabwe.
He particularly referenced his father's decision to leave his accounting profession to pursue fish-tank construction and the economic difficulties the family subsequently experienced.
The story follows Tinashe, a young boy whose family struggles financially after his father abandons his career to pursue his passion for building fish tanks.
With the family's financial situation deteriorating, Tinashe's mother faces the difficult decision of prioritising the family's survival or supporting her husband's ambition.
The Caine Prize describes the work as an exploration of fatherhood, ambition, financial hardship and the complicated influence of family circumstances on individuals.
Vara, however, had explained that her concerns were based on more than the result obtained from the AI-detection platform.
Speaking on the BBC's Front Row programme, she said previous Caine Prize-winning stories she had tested with Pangram were classified as entirely human-written.
She also tested an earlier 2021 story by Kundizeza, which returned a 100 per cent human result.
According to her, the difference in style and tone between that earlier work and The Blue Fighter raised questions about whether both stories came from the same writer.
Kundizeza dismissed the argument, maintaining that writers could develop different styles and approaches to their work.
He argued that having recurring interests did not mean an author would always produce stories using the same structure or literary techniques.
The allegations sparked considerable backlash among African writers and literary commentators, some of whom accused the publication of subjecting black writers to unfair scrutiny.
Wale Lawal, founder of The Republic magazine, described the allegations as “crazy, racist and wildly unethical” in a post on X.
Zimbabwean writer Joe Ruzvidzo also criticised what he called a literary “stop-and-frisk” against black and African writers, while Nigerian publisher Modupe Daramola described the article as shameful and malicious.
The controversy is part of a growing international debate over the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing and the reliability of tools designed to detect machine-generated content.
In October, Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien was embroiled in a similar controversy after allegations that his debut novel, C'etait ca ou mourir (It Was Either That Or Die), had been written using AI.
The book, which explores migration and was expected to be translated into more than 20 countries, was withdrawn from the shortlist of France's prestigious Goncourt literary prize after Pangram reportedly indicated a 100 per cent probability of AI-generated text.
Orélien rejected the allegation, describing it as slander and insisting that he was the author of the novel.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize also came under scrutiny after Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir won the competition amid allegations of AI use.
The latest Caine Prize decision has renewed concerns about the use of automated detection systems in judging literary originality, particularly where their results could lead to public accusations against writers.
By upholding Kundizeza's award after an investigation involving the author, judges, publisher and independent metadata experts, the Caine Prize has sought to settle the dispute while reinforcing the importance of evidence-based assessments of literary authorship.
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