Virginia Evans won the Women's Prize for Fiction for "The Correspondent," and Lyse Doucet won the Women's Prize for Nonfiction for "The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan." Both prizes include a 30,000 pound purse.
The awards highlight significant achievements by female authors in both fiction and nonfiction, aiming to redress gender imbalances in the publishing industry and recognize impactful storytelling.
Virginia Evans has won the Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel "The Correspondent," a story told through letters that became a word-of-mouth bestseller. The book, released in 2025, follows retired lawyer Sybil Van Antwerp's correspondence over years and is slated for a film adaptation starring Jane Fonda.
Canadian journalist Lyse Doucet received the Women's Prize for Nonfiction for "The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan." Doucet, the BBC's chief international correspondent, uses the history of the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul as a lens to explore Afghanistan's recent past.
Both prizes come with a 30,000 pound ($40,000) award and are open to female English-language writers globally. The fiction judging panel chair, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, praised Evans' novel for capturing hearts and effortlessly conveying an ordinary life. The head of the nonfiction jury, Labour Party politician Thangam Debbonaire, described Doucet's work as a perfect narrative nonfiction piece informed by decades of reporting.
The sister prize for nonfiction was established in 2024 to address a gender imbalance in publishing, as only 26.5% of nonfiction books reviewed in British newspapers in 2022 were by women. Previous fiction prize winners include Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver.
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