This week in our poetry news round up we widen our gaze a little to the broader literary world, as both halves of one of the most significant book prizes for women writers were handed out: the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
Virginia Evans Wins the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction
The American novelist Virginia Evans has won the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut, The Correspondent, in a year that marks the thirtieth anniversary of the award. Evans was named the winner on Thursday, 11 June, at the Women’s Prize Trust Summer Party in London, taking a prize that comes with a £30,000 purse and is open to female English-language writers from any country. She is only the seventh debut novelist ever to take the prize in its history, and the second in a row, following Yael van der Wouden’s win in 2025. The Correspondent is a novel told entirely in letters, following Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in her seventies, as she writes to friends, family and a handful of real-life authors. The chair of judges, the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, called it remarkable, praising the skill required to render an emotionally resonant work in such a form and saying it had captured the panel’s hearts. ABC News + 2
Evans’s path to the prize is the sort of story that should hearten any writer staring down a drawer of unpublished manuscripts. She wrote fiction for two decades before producing The Correspondent during the COVID-19 pandemic, having completed seven previous novels that never found a publisher. Released quietly in 2025, the book climbed the bestseller lists by word of mouth and became a book-club favourite, and a film adaptation starring Jane Fonda is now in the works. A graduate of James Madison University, Evans went on to take a master’s in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin before settling in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the novel has now spent some thirty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Of those long years writing without recognition, she put it simply: she had kept going because she did not know how not to, and because she was writing the book she herself wanted to read. ABC News + 3
Lyse Doucet Takes the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
Alongside the fiction award, the Canadian journalist Lyse Doucet was named winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan. Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, received the award at the same London ceremony on 11 June, the non-fiction prize likewise carrying a £30,000 purse and open to women writers worldwide. Her debut book is a richly crafted recent history of modern Afghanistan, told through the many people who lived and worked at Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel across decades of upheaval, and the judges described it as a perfect work of narrative non-fiction.
The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction is still a young award, established to sit beside its long-running fiction counterpart and to spotlight women’s expertise across history, politics, science and the arts. It is given annually for exceptional narrative non-fiction by women, judged on excellence, originality and accessibility, and is open to all women writers around the globe published in the UK and writing in English. Doucet’s win, drawing on a lifetime of reporting from the region, is a fitting demonstration of exactly the kind of authoritative, deeply human storytelling the prize was created to celebrate — and a reminder that some of the most affecting accounts of a place come from those who have spent years bearing witness to it.
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