New Delhi, Oct. 12 -- The Caine Prize for African Writing has begun reviewing allegations that its 2026 winning story, The Blue Fighter by Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza, may have involved artificial intelligence. The organisers confirmed the review on October 11, five days after announcing the winner in London, but have not announced a finding against the author or a withdrawal of his £10,000 award.

The immediate trigger was an article by Vauhini Vara in The Atlantic. Vara reported that the AI-detection service Pangram flagged almost the entire story as AI-generated. That assessment is an allegation about authorship, not proof of how the story was written. Kundizeza's literary agency told Vara that it was confident th...