Debut novelist Virginia Evans has won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction for her novel The Correspondent, while BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet took home the nonfiction award for The Finest Hotel in Kabul. Each author received £30,000 at a ceremony in central London on Thursday evening.
Julia Gillard, former Australian prime minister and chair of the fiction judges, described The Correspondent as “a remarkable novel, with an exemplary combination of originality, excellence and accessibility”, adding that it “captured our hearts, and should be read and savoured by all”. The novel follows 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, who uses letters to confront unresolved parts of her life as she loses her sight.
Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul centres on the Intercontinental Hotel, where she stayed while reporting from Afghanistan, weaving a “people’s history” of the country through the lives of those who passed through it. Thangam Debbonaire, former Labour MP and nonfiction chair of judges, called it “a perfect work of narrative nonfiction … cleverly constructed and brilliantly researched”.
This year’s fiction shortlist also included works by Susan Choi, Addie E Citchens, Marcia Hutchinson, Rozie Kelly and Lily King. The nonfiction shortlist featured titles by Daisy Fancourt, Judith Mackrell, Jane Rogoyska, Arundhati Roy and Ece Temelkuran. The Women’s prize for nonfiction was created in 2023 after research found that only 35.5% of winners across seven major UK nonfiction awards over the previous decade were women.
