The 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, announced Wednesday, features two authors of Indian heritage: Manchester-based Sheena Kalayil and New York-based Megha Majumdar.
The two authors join a longlist that includes 14 other titles, with nine coming from independent publishers and seven from debut novelists. Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura, both shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, also feature, alongside Kit de Waal and Lily King.
A Guardian and a Thief
Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief is set in a future Kolkata devastated by flooding and famine. The novel follows a mother, identified only as Ma, who is days away from emigrating to the United States with her two-year-old daughter and elderly father when her purse containing their hard-won climate visas is stolen. The thief is Boomba, a teenager from a rural coastal area displaced by environmental collapse, who steals the purse hoping to feed his own family.
The book alternates between Ma’s frantic search and Boomba’s escalating desperation over a single week. In his review for The Indian Express, Deputy Associate Editor Aakash Joshi writes, “At times, it feels as though the book is so desperate to touch on the right themes and characters — climate change, selfishness, a billionaire that’s forced in, the capriciousness of American power and the power of its “dream”, NRI longing for home — that it loses itself.”
Majumdar, 37, grew up in Kolkata before moving to the United States in 2006 to study social anthropology at Harvard University. She later earned a master’s degree in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Her debut novel, A Burning, was a New York Times bestseller upon its 2020 release and won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2021 and a Whiting Award in 2022. At the time of her debut’s publication, she worked as an editor at Catapult Books in New York, later becoming editor-in-chief before leaving in 2022 to focus on writing.
A Guardian and a Thief, her second novel, was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award and named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
The Others
Kalayil’s The Others takes a different historical focus, returning to East Berlin in the final days of the Berlin Wall. The novel traces how seismic political change filters into the private lives of three friends.
Kalayil, 55, was born in Zambia in 1970, where her parents were teachers seconded from Kerala, India. She moved to the United Kingdom at 18 and, after graduating, worked in countries including Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Equatorial Guinea, Slovenia and Spain before settling in Edinburgh in 2002. She now teaches at the University of Manchester and holds a doctorate in Linguistics from Lancaster University.
Her debut novel, The Bureau of Second Chances, won the Writers’ Guild Best First Novel Award in 2018. That book followed a recently widowed man returning to his native Kerala after more than 30 years in London. The Inheritance followed in 2018. The Others is her fourth book.
The judges holding the 16 books that make up the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist. (Source: womensprize.com/)
Julia Gillard, former Australian prime minister, chairs this year’s all-female judging panel, which includes poet Mona Arshi, author Salma El-Wardany, writer and comedian Cariad Lloyd, and DJ and author Annie Macmanus.
“Across a longlist that is international in both scope and setting, these sixteen books demonstrate the power of fiction to examine the messy business of being human,” Gillard said in a statement. “From climate change to artificial intelligence, they navigate the issues of our time with urgency and purpose.”
The full longlist, presented alphabetically by author surname:
📌 Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps (Weatherglass Books)
📌 Paradiso by Hannah Lillith Assadi (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
📌 Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Atlantic Books)
📌 Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape, Vintage)
📌 Dominion by Addie E. Citchens (Europa Editions UK)
📌 The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (Sceptre, Hachette UK)
📌The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House UK)
📌 The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson (Cassava Republic Press)
📌 The Others by Sheena Kalayil (Fly on the Wall Press)
📌 Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly (Saraband)
📌 Heart the Lover by Lily King (Canongate)
📌 Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press, Vintage)
📌 A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Scribner, Simon & Schuster)
📌 Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Canongate)
📌 The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal (Tinder Press, Headline)
📌 A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang (Dead Ink)
A shortlist of six will be announced on April 22. The winner will be revealed on June 11 at a ceremony in London, receiving £30,000 (approximately ₹36 lakh) and a bronze statuette known as the Bessie.
Sheena Kalayil and Megha Majumdar feature on the 2026 Women's Prize longlist. 
The judges holding the 16 books that make up the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist. (Source: womensprize.com/)
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