LONDON: A Trinidadian writer with ancestral roots in Bihar, accused of using artificial intelligence to write his entry for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, has been announced as the overall winner.Jameer Nazir, 62, from Cunopia, Trinidad, whose grandfather is from Bihar, won on Tuesday for his story “The Serpent in the Orchard.”Within days of being declared a regional winner in May, cyber sleuths put his story through AI screening tools and announced on social media that the story 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 winning entries for the annual Commonwealth Short Story Prize on its website.The Commonwealth Foundation, which administers the award, announced Nazir as the winner.Nazir explained that chronic health conditions made office writing physically difficult, so he developed his own writing process using speech-to-text tools and his Android phone.Its winning story revolves around a poor Trinidadian farmer struggling to support his wife and child who becomes obsessed with a woman who works in a rum shack.Nazir, who won £5,000, said: “Every day I walked to school past the rum shops where cane workers and laborers gathered. I remember the voices, the laughter, the arguments and the conversations… Even as a child, I felt the hardships endured by families affected by alcohol. ‘The Serpent in the Orchard’ is fiction, but it arose from those early observations.”