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Women's Prize 2026: Virginia Evans, Lyse Doucet Win Honours for Fiction & Non-Fiction
Women's Prize 2026 Announced Fiction Non-FictionThe Women's Prize announced its 2026 winners on 11 June, with American novelist Virginia Evans taking the Fiction prize and Canadian journalist Lyse Doucet winning the Non-fiction award. Both prizes carry a purse of £30,000 and are open to female English-language writers worldwide.
Evans won for The Correspondent, an epistolary novel told through years of letters written by retired lawyer Sybil Van Antwerp to friends, family, and famous writers. Written during the COVID-19 pandemic and released quietly in 2025, the book gradually climbed bestseller lists to become a word-of-mouth sensation and book club favourite—remarkable for an author who had written seven unpublished novels before it. A film adaptation starring Jane Fonda is in development.
Doucet, the BBC's chief international correspondent, won for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan, which profiles the staff and guests of Kabul's once-glamorous Inter-Continental Hotel to offer a microcosm of Afghanistan's turbulent recent history. The non-fiction jury called it "a perfect work of narrative non-fiction, informed by decades of excellent reporting."
Julia Gillard, former Australian Prime Minister and chair of the fiction judging panel, said the novel "captured our hearts" by "elevating an ordinary life in the most heartfelt of ways." Evans herself described The Correspondent as a cry against the loss of handwritten letters in the digital age—"the real tale of history," as she put it.
The Women's Prize for Fiction was founded in 1996. Its non-fiction counterpart was established in 2024 to address a persistent gender imbalance—in 2022, only 26.5% of non-fiction books reviewed in British newspapers were by women.
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