Virginia Evans’s moving debut The Correspondent and Lyse Doucet’s powerful history The Finest Hotel in Kabul have triumphed at the 2026 Women’s Prizes for Fiction and Non-Fiction, respectively

American novelist Virginia Evans has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction with “The Correspondent,” a bestseller told in letters.

BBC foreign correspondent Lyse Doucet picks up the award for non-fiction with her ‘excellent reporting’ on the human story behind Kabul’s InterContinental hotel