James Yu catalogs literary awards granted to works where AI was used or suspected in the writing process, from Japan's Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi prizes that allowed AI from the start to contests where AI use surfaced later.

Award-Winning AI Literature

This a list of literary awards granted to works where AI was used (or was suspected) as part of the writing process

AI WAS ALLOWED FROM THE START

🇯🇵 Short story Are You There? by Kamome Ashizawa — 9th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Excellence Award, 2022
Ashizawa made 101 stories in three weeks with AI. The story that won was mostly written by Ashizawa with a little AI; the other hundred experiments were mostly machine-generated. This was the first AI-assisted story to win a Hoshi prize.

🇯🇵 Short story The Last Painter by Toh Katagiri — 12th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Excellence Award, 2025
The organizers classified it as AI-assisted, but never said exactly how. A fellow finalist says Katagiri told the group that every sentence was written personally.

🇯🇵 Short story Genome Tower by Shamizui — 13th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Grand Prix, 2026
The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.

🇯🇵 Short story Parallel Self-Mediation Co., Ltd. by En Shijima — 13th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Excellence Award, 2026
Shijima described working with AI as feeling more like “choosing” than “writing.” This sounds like a much more generative collaboration than Genome Tower. The prize stood.

🇯🇵 Short story Erinnerung by Rino Takinouchi — 13th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Excellence Award, 2026
ChatGPT produced initial material. Takinouchi corrected confused pronouns, dated phrases, and broken logic, then changed the title and ending and added the CRISPR-Cas9 material. Of the 2026 Hoshi winners, this has the clearest public account of AI-generated prose being extensively rewritten.

The 13th Hoshi award received 2,107 entries. Organizers counted 491 as partly AI-created and said three of the four general-division winners had used AI somewhere in the process.

🇺🇸 Artist books The Library of Nonhuman Books by Karen Ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato — Robert Coover Award, First Place, 2020
An AI reading machine uses computer vision, OCR, and language processing to find short poetic combinations in physical books, erase the surrounding words, pair them with images, and publish new volumes. One of those volumes, Perception, also won Australia’s Cornish Family Prize.

🇸🇰 Poetry collection Výsledky vzniku by Liza Gennart — Zlatá vlna, 2021
Zuzana Husárová and Ľubomír Panák trained GPT-2 on 2,108 Slovak works, then curated and lightly edited its poems. The collection won Slovakia’s annual prize for the best original Slovak poetry book.

🇺🇸 Poetry series ReRites by David Jhave Johnston — Electronic Literature Organization Robert Coover Award, 2022
Twelve books of poetry built from neural-network output selected and edited by Johnston. The project openly calls itself “Human + A.I. poetry,” which is exactly the kind of thing an electronic-literature award exists to recognize.

🇺🇸 Chapbook A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram — DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest, Winner, 2023
Bertram used GPT-3 and Warpland, a model trained on Gwendolyn Brooks. Three sections contain machine responses to her prompts. The press knew how the book was made and published it openly.

🇺🇸 Short story Stargazers by Ruei-Jie Chang — UCSB Mind & Machine Intelligence Writing Contest, First Prize, 2024
Chang used ChatGPT for the seed of the story and Claude to organize and translate a Mandarin-English draft, then revised it. The contest explicitly welcomed human-only, machine-only, and hybrid entries, and required everyone to document the process.

🇷🇺 Short story 30–70 by Yana Vagner — Valentin Kataev Literary Prize, Winner, 2025
Vagner wrote the story with Alice, Yandex’s AI assistant. It begins by showing her prompt and the AI’s response, then uses the system for recurring climate reports. The collaboration was visible when the story won.

🇬🇧 Generative poem WORDS BEYOND WORDS by Sasha Stiles — Lumen Prize Literature & Poetry Award, 2025
A fine-tuned language model uses Stiles’s prompts, source texts, and code to make a new poem whenever the work is refreshed. The system itself, rather than a single fixed output, received the award.

🇬🇧 Interactive fiction Flesh & Blood by Chris Joseph — Electronic Literature Organization Robert Coover Award, 2026
An interactive story where readers solve puzzles in a disturbing world of bodies and machinery. Joseph openly lists it among his AI-assisted works.

ORGANIZERS OR PUBLISHERS SAID AI WAS USED

🇫🇷 Novel C’était ça ou mourir by Thélyson Orélien — Prix du Roman Fnac, 2026
The novel won Fnac’s prize, then was removed from the Goncourt longlist after AI allegations. On October 21, Boréal dropped Orélien after an external review reportedly found AI markers in working-document metadata. The publisher said it still did not know how much AI had been used. Orélien had denied that any sentence was machine-generated.

🇸🇬 Poems Migrant Writers of Singapore poetry competition — Migrant Literature Festival, 2024
Eight winners were announced, then the entire list was recalled after organizers said three winning entries were AI-generated. Their review relied partly on Scribbr and QuillBot.

🇺🇸 Poems Poetry.com November and December contests — Two Monthly First Prizes, 2024
Poetry.com said both original winners were created “with assistance” from AI, changed the results, and redistributed the prizes. The removed poems and writers are no longer reliably identifiable. The names on the current result pages are the replacements, not the accused entrants.

CONFIRMED AI USE

🇯🇵 Novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Kudan — 170th Akutagawa Prize, 2024
Kudan first guessed that about 5% of the novel involved ChatGPT, then gave a much smaller figure: about one page out of 143. She consulted its output for the replies written by the AI inside the novel. The prize stood.

🇨🇳 Short story The Land of Machine Memories by Shen Yang, writing as “QuartZen” — 5th Youth Popular Science and Science Fiction Competition, Second Prize, 2023
AI generated the title, prose, illustrations, and pen name over 66 rounds of prompting. The organizer invited Shen and hid the experiment from the judges. This is often called a national literary prize, but it was a broad Jiangsu association contest: 18 stories shared second prize and 90 of roughly 200 entries received awards.

🇯🇵 Web novel Modest Skill “Tidying Up” Is the Strongest! — 18th AlphaPolis Fantasy Novel Awards, Grand Prize and Reader’s Choice, 2025
The author said a large majority of the web novel was made with generative AI. AlphaPolis later canceled the print edition and manga adaptation and changed its rules. Reporting confirms those cancellations, but not that the two award labels were formally revoked.

🇺🇸 Memoir How to Win One Million Dollars and $#!T Glitter! by Luke Stoffel — IBPA Book Award, Benjamin Franklin Silver Medal for Neurodivergent Communities, 2026
Stoffel says he used ChatGPT for grammar and structural scaffolding and disclosed it in the book and award submission. IBPA’s guidelines did not prohibit AI-assisted work, and the book received Silver. IBPA has not publicly commented on his AI use.

SUSPECTED OR DISPUTED

🇿🇼 Short story The Blue Fighter by Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza — Caine Prize for African Writing, Winner, 2026
Pangram flagged almost the entire story as AI-generated, according to The Atlantic. Kundizeza denied using AI and said the story drew on his family’s experiences. The prize opened a review. No final finding or revocation had been announced as of October 21.

🇬🇧 Short story The Serpent in the Grove by Jamir Nazir — Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Overall Winner, 2026
Pangram called it 100% AI-generated. Nazir denied it and described six or seven drafts made with Android speech-to-text because of a chronic condition. The Commonwealth Foundation reviewed drafts, timestamps, notes, and testimony, accepted his account, and kept the award. The allegation is disputed, not proven.

🇬🇧 Short story The Bastion’s Shadow by John Edward DeMicoli — Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Canada and Europe Winner, 2026
Pangram also returned 100% here. DeMicoli produced handwritten drafts, notes, and years of research and denied using AI. The Foundation accepted the evidence and the prize stood.

🇬🇧 Short story Mehendi Nights by Sharon Aruparayil — Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Asia Winner, 2026
Aruparayil denied using AI at any stage and kept a paper trail. She also found that adding three Marathi words and removing one word made a flagged section register as 100% human. The Foundation kept the award.

🇬🇧 Short story Descend by Chanel Sutherland — Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Overall Winner, 2025
Pangram scanned the story a year later and labeled it 88% AI-generated. Sutherland denied using AI and said its repetition and rhythm come from Vincentian oral storytelling. Her publisher and agent backed her. No public provenance review of the 2025 story has been released.

🇬🇧 Short story Back and Forth by Kavyta Kay — Harper’s Bazaar UK Short Story Competition, Winner, 2026
A screenshot of a 100% Pangram result spread online. No author response, organizer investigation, admission, or revocation has surfaced.

🇬🇧 Poem + unknown Peter Doolan and an unnamed winner — Plaza Prizes, 2025
The Plaza disqualified both after detector flags while admitting it could not know how much AI had been used, “if any.” Both denied it. Doolan said his poem had already been published in 2018. This looks less like an AI scandal than a detector-driven procedural failure.

NOMINATIONS AND SHORTLISTS WITHDRAWN

🇺🇸 Comics anthology Stardust the Super Wizard Anthology — Eisner Award for Best Anthology, Nominee, 2026
One page was an AI-generated comic credited to the invented “Alex Irons.” The editor and other contributors reportedly did not know. After Comic-Con said the judges would not have nominated it had they known, the editor withdrew the anthology from the ballot.

🇧🇷 Illustrated edition Frankenstein, Clube de Literatura Clássica edition — Prêmio Jabuti Illustration Category, Finalist, 2023
The book openly credited designer Vicente Pessôa and Midjourney and was marketed as fully AI-illustrated. Two judges said they did not realize Midjourney was AI. The edition was disqualified under rules that had never anticipated generative art.

🇬🇧 Illustrated book Unnamed illustrated title — Ink Book Prize, Shortlisted, 2026
The prize removed one title after complaints about AI in its illustrations. A different shortlistee withdrew in protest. Comparing the old and new lists suggests possible titles, but neither the organizers nor the reporting named the accused book, so I won’t either.

NEAR-MISSES AND ELIGIBILITY CASES

🇳🇿 Novellas + stories Angel Train and Obligate Carnivore by Elizabeth Smither and Stephanie Johnson — Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, 2026
Both books were initially barred because their publisher used AI-generated covers, then reinstated after the awards trust decided the rule had arrived too late. Neither reached the longlist.

🇯🇵 Short story Cage of Algorithms by Keiji Aono — 12th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Finalist, 2025
Aono says roughly 80% was AI-generated and 20% human-revised. It reached the final ten out of 1,250 entries but did not win.

🇯🇵 Short story The Day a Computer Writes a Novel — 3rd Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, First Round, 2016
Humans supplied the plot, characters, and language components; software assembled the prose. It passed the first screening but did not win. The rules explicitly allowed nonhuman entrants, making this a pre-LLM precursor rather than a deception.

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