Overview
- The Women’s Prize Trust announced winners on Thursday that saw Virginia Evans take the 2026 Fiction prize for The Correspondent and Lyse Doucet win the Non‑Fiction prize for The Finest Hotel in Kabul.
- Each author received £30,000 and a commemorative sculpture, with Evans awarded the Bessie statuette and Doucet the Charlotte sculpture donated by the Charlotte Aitken Trust.
- Evans’s debut is an epistolary novel about a 73‑year‑old woman reconnecting through letters, a book that became a word‑of‑mouth bestseller and has a film adaptation in development.
- Doucet’s debut narrative history uses Kabul’s InterContinental hotel and the lives of its staff and guests to trace Afghanistan’s recent conflicts, a book judges praised for research and humane reporting.
- Judges chaired by Julia Gillard (fiction) and Thangam Debbonaire (non‑fiction) framed the results as evidence that the prize continues to correct gender imbalances in literary recognition and to accelerate writers’ careers through money, publicity and critical endorsement.