Award-winning novel accused of being written by AI and its Spain tour canceled
Mexican publisher Almadía halted the Spanish tour for the novel Donde el agua trabaja by Peruvian author David Silva Rojas after a detection tool indicated 99% of the text may have been written by artificial intelligence, despite the book having won a €20,000 prize that explicitly bans such use.
Spanish-language literary circles are experiencing an unprecedented controversy after Mexican publisher Almadía suspended all events presenting the novel Donde el agua trabaja in Spain, following an analysis that showed 99 percent of its text was written by artificial intelligence, even though it won an international literary prize whose rules explicitly ban any use of the technology.
A prize worth €20,000
The short novel is by Peruvian writer David Silva Rojas. It won in July 2026 the first edition of the International Short Novel Prize launched by Mexican publisher Almadía and the Spanish Ventosa Arovat Foundation in November 2025, with a value of €20,000. The novel was chosen from 2,204 manuscripts by a jury that included Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza, the Argentine Silva Almada and the Ecuadorian Mónica Ochoa, who praised its "use of silence" and its concise language.
The prize rules were clear: entry required a declaration that the work had not been written wholly or partly using artificial intelligence tools, and any indicator or suspicion of a breach would lead to exclusion of the work at any stage.
99 percent according to the detection tool
The accusation followed an analysis by a Spanish newspaper of 175 Spanish-language literary works using the program "Pangram", one of the leading tools for detecting AI-generated text, which concluded that 99 percent of the novel's text was written by artificial intelligence. If confirmed, it would be the first case of this magnitude in Spanish-language literature.
Cancellation of the tour in Spanish cities
The novel was scheduled to be presented on Friday, October 23 in Madrid, then in Barcelona, Seville and Cádiz, but the publisher announced the suspension of all events related to the book in Spain pending a "detailed review without preempting the results." Almadía said the author assured them he did not use artificial intelligence and that it "has no grounds to doubt his statement," noting that the jury and the editorial team did not observe any sign of AI use during reading and review. It added that detection tools can provide valuable information but require deeper analysis when a writer's career and readers' trust are at stake.
Who is the author
Silva Rojas is from the Peruvian city of Ica; he is a lawyer and researcher, and says he lived in the Japanese city of Toyohashi since childhood. The novel is set in Ica; the author has said in previous interviews that it originated in academic research on farmworkers in the agricultural export sector and that he was influenced by the haiku poem's way of concentrating experience in a few elements. This is his first published novel.
Limits of detection tools
Experts point out that AI-detection tools are not infallible: they recognize certain patterns in text but do not determine the nature of the human role in the writing, whether the technology was used to generate the entire text or to convert a writer's notes and ideas into prose. They also note that the very short-sentence style that characterizes the novel resembles patterns favored by some AI models, so the influence of that style on the result cannot be entirely ruled out, although the tool gains accuracy with longer texts.
Precedent in France
The case comes days after a French publisher cut ties with writer Telisson Aurélien amid accusations of using artificial intelligence in his novel It Was That or Death, which had been among works shortlisted for the Goncourt prize. The author denied the accusations, placing the role of this technology in literary creativity and award standards at the center of the cultural debate.
