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I am not interested in arguing about whether Jamir Nazir used AI.

I do not know, you do not know, the judges do not know, Granta does not know, the Commonwealth Foundation does not know. The AI detection tools certainly do not know. Their own creators have repeatedly acknowledged that these systems identify statistical patterns rather than authorship. They cannot prove who wrote a piece of work. They can only suggest possibilities.

Yet for weeks now, the conversation has revolved almost entirely around artificial intelligence.

But have we been asking the right questions at all?

It seems to me that the question is not whether AI wrote “The Serpent in the Grove”. The more necessary question is how “The Serpent in the Grove” came to be selected in the first place.

Seven thousand, eight hundred and six stories were submitted for the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Those stories passed through multiple rounds of reading. A team of readers conducted the first sift, then a panel of judges reviewed the remaining work. More cuts followed. Discussions took place. Decisions were made. Eventually, one story emerged as a regional winner and was published by one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the English-speaking world.

Then readers encountered it and all hell broke loose. Everyone, or at least the majority of readers, arrived at the same conclusion almost immediately.

Something was very wrong.

This story had no bearing. The prose was undeniably flat, the metaphors strained, the imagery often seemed disconnected from the story’s emotional reality. The plot moved in strange and sometimes baffling directions. Whether you disliked it mildly or intensely, it is difficult to deny that large numbers of readers were left wondering how this piece had survived such a competitive selection process and come out on top. “The Serpent in the Grove” was simply abysmal, if I dare say so myself. And that is the conversation I want to have.

Because even if every allegation of AI use disappeared tomorrow, the underlying question would remain.

Why was this story chosen?

If there had been no accusations, would anyone have questioned the decision at all? Would readers have been invited to discuss the quality of the writing? Would anyone have examined the judging process? Would we have looked closely at the assumptions built into literary gatekeeping? Or would the story simply have been accepted because a prestigious institution had already stamped it with approval?

Literary prizes are not AI detection exercises. Their purpose is not to identify machine-generated text. Their purpose is to recognise exceptional writing.

Those are two entirely different tasks.

A judging panel should not need software to tell them whether a story is worth celebrating. Their expertise is supposed to lie in reading itself. In recognising originality. In identifying emotional truth. In distinguishing between work that genuinely moves the reader and work that merely looks like literature. If a story reaches the top of a prize with thousands of submissions and readers immediately begin questioning its quality, then the institution responsible for selecting it must be willing to examine its own processes.

I put it to you then that perhaps the real failure was not artificial intelligence but human judgement. Literary institutions often enjoy a degree of deference that few other cultural organisations receive. A prize announces a winner. A magazine publishes a story. A panel selects a shortlist. Many readers assume that somebody else has already done the difficult work of evaluation.

This controversy has shattered that assumption. We read the story for ourselves and we disagreed with the judges. We saw what we saw with our own eyes, and we are left to ask whether the emperor has any clothes at all.

These institutions cannot and should not be above scrutiny. That scrutiny is healthy. In fact, it is long overdue. Fallibility is not a scandal in literature and art. It is a condition. Institutions get things wrong all the time, and yet the moment we dare to question them, to interrogate their systems and their decisions, they retreat. They close ranks. They issue careful statements and sever ties and call it integrity.

Granta, for all its history and reputation, made the deeply troubling decision to end its partnership with the Commonwealth Short Story Prize rather than examine what went wrong and do the harder work of doing better. In doing so, it further abandoned the writers who are already marginalised, already fighting, already carrying more than their share.

And so once again, the writer who had nothing to do with any of this ultimately bears the cost of the confusion and failures of these celebrated institutions.

Granta will be okay. The judges will be fine. The Commonwealth Foundation will survive. It is the emerging writer who is left bruised and hollowed out. The writer who finds themselves standing once more at a door that has been quietly shut. For years, writers from the global minority have fought for recognition within institutions that were never quite built with them in mind. Now a new anxiety has entered the room. Will my work be judged on its merits? Or will it be judged against an algorithm? Will I be turned away before anyone has even read a single line, simply because I am writing from one of the countries tangled up in this controversy?

These are the questions. There are no clean answers.

There is a responsibility here — one of transparency, of accountability, of care. Instead, blame was redirected and consequences were distributed downward swiftly and without apology. When mistakes happen, the answer cannot always be to close ranks, issue vague statements and move on. The answer cannot be to redirect attention away from failures of judgement and towards technologies that conveniently absorb public outrage.

The biggest lesson I am taking from this controversy is not that artificial intelligence threatens literature. It is that literary institutions, first and foremost, are fallible. They are not arbiters of worth. They are not guardians of objective truth. They are organisations made up of human beings operating within systems shaped by bias, limitation, resource constraints, and imperfect judgement.

If institutions are fallible, the solution is not less scrutiny. It is, rather, more scrutiny. The answer is never silence or severance. It is accountability, reflection, and correction.

That is what literature demands. That is what writers deserve. If the institutions will not hold themselves accountable, then we must learn the hard lesson of letting go. Your work does not become literature because a judge says so. Your legitimacy as a writer is not tethered to a prize or a magazine.Dear emerging writer, early-career writer, writer of colour — please keep writing, keep creating, keep touching lives, and please keep telling our stories.