A Twist in This Year’s Strangest Literary AI Scandal; The Atlantic, July 3, 2026

Will Oremus , The Atlantic; A Twist in This Year’s Strangest Literary AI Scandal

Jamir Nazir, the controversial winner of the Commonwealth award, tells his side of the story.

"In a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon, Nazir told me that he feels vindicated—and relieved. “Look, I didn’t use it!” he said about AI. Now that he has won the prize, Nazir said, he is free at last to explain his process and clear his name.

We talked for more than an hour about his writing process, his health (he referenced complications with both diabetes and cancer), and his views on technology. On several occasions, he seemed to avoid answering my questions directly; when he did, some of the answers were circuitous. I was surprised to hear him opine that AI-generated writing will soon be widely accepted in literature, even as he maintained that he didn’t use AI tools in creating his story. He seemed bullish on AI overall, viewing it as a revolutionary technology, though he worried about the repercussions of saying so. Although he couldn’t name any works by Derek Walcott, a writer he cited as one of his main literary inspirations, he said that he had prepared a collection of short stories in Walcott’s style, which he hopes to publish soon."