American author Virginia Evans has moonlighted as a writer outside of her working life - those jobs that pay the bills but don’t make your heart sing - for years. There were other novels before this - none of which were sold or published - but still, she persevered through these “failures”, to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction with her debut novel, The Correspondent.Speaking to the Mirror after her Women’s Prize win, Evans said: “I had many failures and some people will say, ‘No, it wasn't failure! It was just part of the process!’ But it was failure and I'm very comfortable with that.”That “gruelling process” of sending out work, for it to be deemed “not good enough” to publish, is an essential part of Evan’s development as a writer of novels. She said: “I would hate for that to be erased from the story. What I was developing was courage.”She tells the Mirror’s resident book critic Dr Aimee Walsh that she carved time to write around her job and home-life. She worked as a clerk for a lawyer, a customer service operative for a high-end jewellery company, and scheduling surgery for an orthopaedic surgeon.‌Each of these jobs were “just to make money,” she explained, as her heart lay with writing. In the mornings, before getting her kids up and beginning her day job, she worked on her manuscript.The perseverance paid off, when on 11th June at a ceremony in Bedford Square Gardens, London, she was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel. She said: “I didn't expect to win… You just don't think anything like that would ever happen.”As the winner of the prize, the largest annual celebration of women’s creativity in the world, Evans will receive £30,000.‌Virginia Evan’s The Correspondent is a story told through letters. This form is not new, it spans centuries - from Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) to 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (1970). Society has moved from letter writing to phone-calls to text messages to emails to direct messages sent through social media apps.The protagonist Sybil Van Antwerp is a pensioner with a penchant for correspondence. She voraciously writes letters to friends, family, writers - whoever pops into her mind. A retired legal professional who spent her time committed to her job instead of family life, she is now reckoning with her decisions, all of those little moments which culminate into a life.The Correspondent forces the reader to reconsider their relationship with the world. In a cultural moment where the speed of messaging - from marketing to news - is key. It is a reminder to consider what marks on the world we will leave behind.In a digital world, where we feel hyper-connected though in reality are (ironically) less connected than ever, The Correspondent is about the radical act of slowing down and giving consideration, intention and attention. Evans describes this disconnect as a “lonely culture”. She explained: “In America most people live in a single family home and drive everywhere so you don't see your neighbours. You come home and you pull into your garage and you close the door and you're inside.”‌Evans told The Mirror about the synchronicity between the book and her life. In a letter Sybil writes to real-life author Ann Pratchett about her real-life novel States of Wonder , Sybil says: “It was wonderful to read such a complex woman of her vintage, bold with her intelligence and dignity as well as her errors, and the layers upon layers of her.” In a beautiful echoing, Pratchett has endorsed The Correspondent , praising the book as a “cause for celebration”.What came first the chicken or the egg - the endorsement or the inclusion in the manuscript? Evans explained that she wrote to Patchett years ago about her book Commonwealth. Patchett wrote her back, and they began corresponding once a year since then. Evans described the kindness and guidance Patchett gave to her through the road to publication.The Correspondent made its way, via publishing editors, to Patchett’s desk. And months later, the endorsement arrived: “Virginia Evans shows how one woman changes at a point when change had seemed impossible. That change, like this novel, turns out to be a cause for celebration”.‌Evans worried about whether this was under duress, after their years of writing to one another. She said: “I got a letter from her in the mail. She said, ‘Listen to me. I'm sure you're wondering did I just do that to do a favour for you. I didn't. I wrote it because that's what I think. It's like she could read my mind and she knew I was going to second guess.”The novelist has further reason to celebrate, as the book has been picked up for the big screen, with filming for a movie set to begin in January 2027. Jane Fonda will play Sybil, and Evans says that the actress is thinking about the character “every waking moment and dreams about her in her sleep.”In another moment of synergy, Evans’s work-in-progress novel is about a book about the making of a movie, which was in the works before the rights sold to The Correspondent.Love reading? Join Dr. Aimée Walsh and our community of fellow readers in the Mirror Book Club to dive deeper into the books everyone is talking about.