LONDON: A Trinidadian writer with ancestral roots in Bihar has been accused of using AI to write his entry for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which has been declared the overall winner.Jamir Nazir, 62, of Kunupia, Trinidad, whose grandfather was from Bihar, won the award on Tuesday for his story “The Serpent in the Grove.”Within days of her being announced as the regional winner in May, internet experts had put her story through AI checkers and declared on social media that it was written by AI, with some claiming it was “100% AI generated”. The controversy led to the literary magazine Granta announcing that it would no longer publish the winning entries of the annual Commonwealth Short Story Prize on its website.The Commonwealth Foundation, which administers the prize, announced Nazir’s win.Nazir explained that chronic health conditions made desk typing physically challenging, so he has developed his own writing process using speech-to-text tools and his Android phone.His triumphant story is about a poor Trinidadian farmer struggling to support his wife and child who becomes obsessed with a woman who works at a rum shack.“Every day, I would walk to school past the rum shops, where sugarcane workers and laborers would gather. I remember the voices, the laughter, the debates and conversations… Even as a child, I felt the hardships faced by families affected by alcohol. ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ is fictional, but it evolved from those early observations,” Nazir, who has won £5,000, said.