Evans, Doucet win 2026 Women’s Prizes
In the UK, the 2026 Women’s Prizes have been announced.
US novelist Virginia Evans has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Correspondent (Michael Joseph) and Canadian journalist Lyse Doucet has won the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (Hutchinson Heinemann).
The Correspondent is described as an uplifting story told through a series of letters. The book follows 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp as she faces declining health while confronting the hubris of youth with the wisdom of age.
Fiction prize chair and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard said, “The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a remarkable novel, with an exemplary combination of originality, excellence and accessibility. 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. 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.”
In The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Doucet “places the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul at the centre of her remarkably vivid history of modern Afghanistan, recounting the story of how Afghans have survived decades of destruction and turbulence through the lens of the hotel and the people who lived and worked there.”
Nonfiction prize chair Thangam Debbonaire said the book “is a perfect work of narrative nonfiction: it is not only cleverly constructed and brilliantly researched, but each and every element is handled with extraordinary sensitivity and warmth – it will move you to tears or make you laugh, or perhaps both.
“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.”
Both Evans and Doucet will receive £30,000. Evans will receive a statuette known as the “Bessie”, created and donated by the late artist Grizel Niven, while Doucet will receive the “Charlotte” sculpture, gifted by the Charlotte Aitken Trust.
At last year’s awards, Yael van der Wouden won the fiction prize for The Safekeep (Penguin), while Rachel Clarke won the nonfiction prize for The Story of a Heart (Abacus).
Category: International awards International news
