Virginia Evans and Lyse Doucet win Women's Prize book awards

Virginia Evans won the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction and Lyse Doucet won the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction at a London ceremony on June 11.

Each award carries £30,000, or about $40,000, and both winners were chosen from shortlists announced earlier in the spring.

Fiction winner: Virginia Evans

Evans won for The Correspondent, her debut novel about Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer who reflects on her life through letters.

The fiction prize was chaired by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard. The judges singled out the book as a standout among the year's women-authored fiction.

The award is likely to boost the novel's sales and visibility, and could add to interest in any future adaptation.

Nonfiction winner: Lyse Doucet

Doucet won for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan, a book that uses Kabul's Inter-Continental Hotel as a frame for telling a broader history of Afghanistan and the people connected to it.

Doucet is the BBC's chief international correspondent. The nonfiction panel was chaired by Thangam Debbonaire.

The nonfiction prize was created in 2023 to help address the long-running under-recognition of women in nonfiction publishing.

Why it matters

The Women's Prize is one of the most closely watched literary awards for women writing in English. This year's results gave the fiction prize to a debut novelist and the nonfiction prize to a veteran broadcaster, underscoring the range of work the awards are designed to recognize.

The ceremony also reinforced the commercial value of the prizes, which can quickly raise the profile of winning books and shape the wider literary conversation around women-authored fiction and nonfiction.