Granta stops publishing short essay winners in AI debates | Grant

A popular literary magazine Grant will no longer publish the results of the annual Commonwealth Games after one of this year’s winners made allegations of using AI.

The magazine said it would no longer have an “external publishing contract” in which it had no editorial control.

In a statement to the Guardian, Granta said: “The 2026 selection of Commonwealth Prize winners has sparked a huge controversy, based on suggestions that one or more of the stories may have been partially manipulated by AI, allegations the authors have denied.

“Due to our editorial integrity, the Granta Trust has now decided that we will not engage in external publishing contracts. We will keep the following Commonwealth award news on our website for public interest, and I wish our long-time partner, the Commonwealth Foundation, all the best in its endeavours.”

This year’s winning story from the Caribbean region, Snake in the Bush and Jamir Nazir, began attracting attention on X and Bluesky in mid-May, when the critics said the article contained “visible signs” of AI-generated text.

This article has things arranged in three parts and “not x, but y”, which some see as a sign of AI. Critics also emphasized words like “The sun on galvanize is a brutal weapon” and “He had the kind of movement that made the benches men”.

“My writing is unusual”, Nazir told the Supervisor via email at the end of May. “This is done entirely on an Android phone. This is necessary because of chronic diseases that make continuous, desk-bound typing impossible. That’s why I rely on speech to type, followed by a small change of keyboard, and the same speech-to-text method.

Sigrid Rausing, Granta’s publisher and philanthropist, released a statement on May 19 in response to the controversy: “It may be that the jury will now award the AI ​​fraud case – we don’t know, and we probably never will.”

On the same day, the director of the Commonwealth Foundation, Razmi Farook, said: “All the selected authors said that no AI was used and, in further discussions, the foundation confirmed this.”

The awards offer £5,000 to overall winners and £2,500 to regional winners. According to the Sigrid Rausing Trust website, the trust donated £30,000 to the Commonwealth’s short prize between them. 2014 and 2016.

The Commonwealth Award did not respond to a request for comment.