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 the nonfiction award for The Finest Hotel in Kabul. Each author receives £30,000.
Announced at a ceremony in central London on Thursday evening, the fiction prize was judged by a panel chaired by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard. She described Evans’s novel as “a remarkable novel, with an exemplary combination of originality, excellence and accessibility”.
The Correspondent is composed of letters written by the irascible 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, who uses correspondence to confront unresolved parts of her life as she loses her sight. A film adaptation starring Oscar-winning actor Jane Fonda is in production.
Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul centres on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, offering a “people’s history” of modern Afghanistan through the lives of those who passed through. Thangam Debbonaire, chair of the nonfiction judges, called it “a perfect work of narrative nonfiction”.
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.
