Virginia Evans, Lyse Doucet win 2026 Women's Prizes

American novelist Virginia Evans won the Women’s Prize for Fiction on June 11 with The Correspondent, a word-of-mouth bestseller that made her a literary star after seven unpublished novels.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan by Canadian journalist Lyse Doucet, was winner of the Women's Prize for Nonfiction.

The prizes bring the same GBP 30,000 ($40,000) purse, and are open to female writers in English from all countries.

Evans first became a fiction writer 20 years ago, and produced The Correspondent during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2025 and it was quietly released. It evolved from years of letters that retired lawyer Sybil Van Antwerp sent to friends, family and famous authors, and climbed the bestseller lists and book club favorites. There's a movie in development starring Jane Fonda.

Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who chaired the fiction judging panel, said the novel “captured our hearts” by “elevating an ordinary life in the most heartfelt of ways.”

Evans said she “developed a very thick skin for rejection and failure” during the years of writing without getting published. “Why did I keep going? I didn’t know how not to, I guess,” she told The Associated Press.

“I was writing the book that I wanted to read,” she added. “I guess the book that I was wanting to read was the book a lot of people wanted to read.” She said The Correspondent is in part a cry against the loss of handwritten letters — “the real tale of history” — in our digital age.

The BBC chief international correspondent, Doucet, profiles the staff and guests of Kabul's former glamorous Inter-Continental Hotel, which is scarred but still standing, to give a microcosm of Afghanistan's tumultuous recent history.

Key Highlights:

• Virginia Evans won the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction for The Correspondent
• Lyse Doucet won the 2026 Women's Prize for Nonfiction for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan
• Both winners received a £30,000 prize, with awards open to female writers in English worldwide

Thangam Debbonaire, member of the labor party and chair of the nonfiction jury, said: “It is an excellent piece of reporting over many years that informs this perfect work of narrative non-fiction”.

Doucet, who has been visiting Afghanistan as a journalist since the 1980s, said she wrote the book to give a broader picture than the “snapshot” of news coverage.

“My experience from decades of covering countries and people in the hardest of times is that people still have to get up every day and find an everyday courage to get through the day,” she said. “And even in the darkest of places. People find humor to bring light, they try to live with hope to bring some kind of relief and they try to live with humanity.

Past winners of the fiction award, which has been in existence since 1996, have included Zadie Smith, Tayari Jones and Barbara Kingsolver.

The sister prize for nonfiction was founded in 2024 to help redress a gender imbalance in publishing. Less than a quarter (26.5%) of the nonfiction books reviewed in Britain’s newspapers in 2022 was by women, and male writers dominated in established nonfiction writing prizes.

Last year, The Story of a Heart, a book about an organ transplant by British doctor Rachel Clarke, took home the nonfiction prize.