American debut novelist Virginia Evans has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, with BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet taking home the award for non-fiction.
Evans’s The Correspondent and Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul were announced as the winners at a London ceremony on Thursday evening (11 June). Both authors will receive £30,000 in prize money.
The judging panel, chaired by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, described The Correspondent as “exemplary”. The uplifting epistolary novel follows the witty 73-year-old protagonist Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer who attempts to reconnect with estranged loved ones through letters and emails.
Published in April 2025, the novel asks questions about the choices we make, the regrets we harbour and the unexpected second chances we get in life. It previously won the PEN/Hemingway award.
“It is no mean feat to write a life in letters, but Evans makes this feel effortless, asking the reader to consider the choices we make, whilst elevating an ordinary life in the most heartfelt of ways,” said Gillard of the winning novel.
“The sheer skill required to render an emotionally resonant and engaging work in this format is spectacular. This is a novel that captured our hearts, and should be read and savoured by all.”
Evans wrote and scrapped seven unpublished novels over two decades before writing The Correspondent, which The Independent’s culture editor Jessie Thompson described as “full of warmth” and “impossible to put down”.
Meanwhile, Doucet’s debut work The Finest Hotel in Kabul picked up the award for non-fiction, having been shortlisted for the Nero Book Award and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
The book serves as a sweeping social history of the InterContinental hotel in Kabul, established in 1969, where staff faced conflict and upheaval, including a Soviet evacuation, civil war, the US invasion, and the rise of the Taliban.
Told through the eyes of the people who lived through it – including Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper trained in the hotel’s 1970 glory days, and Afifa, the first female chef at the fall of the Taliban in 2001 – the book has been hailed by judges as “cleverly constructed and brilliantly researched”, and “a perfect work of narrative non-fiction”.
“Informed by decades of excellent reporting, Doucet centres the real-life experiences of people – the staff and guests, alongside the hotel itself – and with the future of Afghanistan still being written, this book’s importance will only get stronger as the years go by,” said Thangham Debonnaire, the chair of judges for the 2026 non-fiction award.
In addition to the cash prize, Doucet will receive the “Charlotte” sculpture, while Evans will take home the “Bessie” statuette.
The Correspondent was one of four debut novels on the shortlist of six, which also featured works by celebrated writers like Lily King and Susan Choi. It beat The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson, Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly, Addie E Citchens’s Dominion, Lily King’s Heart the Lover, and Susan Choi’s Flashlight.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction, which is now in its 30th year, was set up in 1995 in the wake of an all-male Booker prize shortlist in 1991. It has previously been won by authors including Zadie Smith, Ali Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Last year’s winner was The Safekeep by Yael Van der Wouden.
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Shortlisted alongside The Finest Hotel in Kabul was Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health by Daisy Fancourt, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The lives and loves of Gwen and August John by Judith Mackrell, Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska, Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran, and Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me.
The inaugural non-fiction prize was awarded to Naomi Klein last year for her political memoir Doppelganger, after research commissioned by the Women’s Prize Trust found that female non-fiction writers are less likely to win prizes or be reviewed than male authors.
