TRINIDADIAN author Jamir Nazir, who won the Caribbean Category of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize with his story ‘The Serpent in the Grove,’ has been announced as the overall winner of the literary competition.
The announcement was made yesterday during a film documenting the five regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
In a release from Commonwealth Foundation Creatives, the chair of the judging panel, Louise Doughty, together with the 2026 panel of judges, said: ‘We are hugely proud of our shortlist, regional winners and our overall winner, ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ by Jamir Nazir, is an original, poetic and deeply moving story.’
He was selected as the winner from 7,806 entries from across the Commonwealth. His story, ‘The Serpent in the Grove,’ explores betrayal, survival and the stubborn force of a woman’s will in a rural Trinidadian setting.
Nazir’s win is clouded by several accusations both locally and internationally that his story may have been AI-assisted. Similar accusations were made against other members of the shortlist but ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ faced the most scrutiny. Nazir denied that his story was AI-assisted but the controversy led prominent literary magazine Granta to announce that it would no longer publish the winning entries of the annual Commonwealth Short Story prize. The Commonwealth Foundation said a review of the winning stories of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story competition had found that no AI was used.
In an interview last week, Professor Emeritus of West Indian Literature at The University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, and noted Caribbean literary critic Kenneth Ramchand had described the Commonwealth Foundation’s investigation into the AI allegations as ‘unsatisfactory.’
In an e-mail yesterday, Ramchand said: ‘I am surprised that the Foundation did not defer to some weighty opinion and conduct a proper investigation.’
Former prize winner and Trinidadian writer Kevin Jared Hosein has been one of Nazir’s most vocal critics. In a post in May, he had said the prize is ‘dead’, with the ‘first blow’ being Nazir’s ‘AI-alleged’ short story, and the second the Commonwealth Foundation which supported the writer and the judges who selected his story. Yesterday, in a post responding to Nazir’s win, he wrote: ‘The Prize is Dead. Long live the Prize…?’
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is an annual award for the best unpublished short fiction from Commonwealth countries.
The prize awards £2,500 to each regional winner and £5,000 to the overall winner. The 2026 competition saw 7,806 entriesthe second highest number in the prize’s history.
The other regional winners of the competition were T&T-born Lisa-Anne Julien (South Africa, Africa region); Sharon Aruparayil (India, Asia region); John Edward DeMicoli (Malta, Canada and Europe region); and Holly Ann Miller (New Zealand, Pacific region).
