Yet Another Literary Prizewinner Seems to Be AI

B ecause literary journals tend to have small circulations, few readers are likely to have come across “ The Whistleblower ,” a short story by the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza.

Published in 2021 in a journal called Transition , the story is a taut and closely observed political thriller in miniature.

Its narrator, a sharp but inexperienced computer-science graduate in Harare, Zimbabwe, encounters an intelligence officer at the mall—a former teacher of his—who now wants something from him.

At first, the graduate is nervous for what turns out to be the wrong reason: “I’d had a brief relationship with his niece Agatha and I wasn’t sure whether he knew about this or how he felt about it if he did.” A more recent story with Kundizeza’s name on it, “ The Blue Fighter ,” will surely find its way to more readers.

Last week, it was named the winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing, which awards 10,000 British pounds (about $13,000) for a short story by an African writer.

Some previous winners, including Namwali Serpell and NoViolet Bulawayo , are now among the world’s most celebrated authors.

Taste is subjective, but trust me, this story is bad—maudlin and full of tired tropes.

Here, the Zimbabwean narrator is the son of a hapless father who squanders the family’s money trying to breed fish in tanks, to the mother’s chagrin.

“‘We can’t afford this house anymore,’ she said one evening, placing the notice in front of him while he tested the seal on his newest creation,” the story reads.

“Not with anger, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had known all along this moment would come.” At the end, the narrator compares the last remaining fish to his family: “Not broken, just learning how to live differently.

Alone, sometimes.

But still moving.

Still here.” That this narrator has all the personality of a chatbot is probably not coincidental.

The AI detector Pangram flags almost the entire story as AI-generated; a notable exception is its epigraph, also about a father with a fish fixation, which is excerpted from what’s described as an unpublished poem by Vangile Gantsho.