LONDON (AP): American novelist Virginia Evans has secured the Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Correspondent, while Canadian journalist Lyse Doucet has taken the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan.
The awards, announced Thursday, each carry £30,000, or about US$40,000, and are available to women writing in English, regardless of nationality.
Evans had completed seven novels that were never published before she wrote The Correspondent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book arrived with little fanfare in 2025, then built momentum on bestseller lists and among book clubs.
The novel is structured through letters written over many years by Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer, to relatives, friends and well-known authors. A screen version featuring Jane Fonda is now being developed.
Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, chair of the fiction judges, said the work “captured our hearts”.
“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,” Gillard said.
Doucet, who serves as the BBC’s chief international correspondent, uses Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel to examine Afghanistan’s recent upheavals through the people connected to it. The once stylish property has been damaged over time, but remains open.
Thangam Debbonaire, the Labour Party politician who led the nonfiction judging panel, described Doucet’s book as “a perfect work of narrative non-fiction” and said it was “informed by decades of excellent reporting”.
The fiction award began in 1996, with past recipients including Zadie Smith, Tayari Jones and Barbara Kingsolver.
Its nonfiction companion prize was launched in 2024 as part of an effort to address publishing’s gender gap. In 2022, women wrote only 26.5 per cent of the nonfiction books reviewed by newspapers in Britain, while men continued to dominate major nonfiction prize lists.
The first nonfiction winner, last year, was British doctor Rachel Clarke, honoured for The Story of a Heart, her book about an organ transplant.
Syndicated from Jamaica Gleaner · originally published .