Susan Choi, Lily King, and Virginia Evans make the cut: 2026 Women’s Prize shortlist revealed

Choi, who won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel Trust Exercise, draws on cases of around 84,500 South Koreans being abducted by North Korea, to explore how the the kidnappings continue to haunt multiple generations of affected families. A review in The Indian Express called “Flashlight by Susan Choi, a haunting tale of memory, loss, and the shadows of history.”

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House, UK)

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. (Source: Generated using AI)

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is an epistolary debut that judges described as “immediately original” and possessed of “real emotional heft.”

The novel is a portrait of the life of Sybil Van Antwerp, told through her correspondence over the course of her lifetime. It begins Antwerp was in her early 70s, and  through her letters, readers flesh out Sybil, her personality and idiosyncrasies.

The protagonist must fix a difficult relationship with her children, take a final chance at romance, and come to terms with a devastating loss she has carried for 30 years.

The American writer Ann Patchett has called the book “a portrait of a small life expanding.”

Heart the Lover by Lily King (Canongate)

Heart the Lover by Lily King. (Generated using AI)

Lily King is one of the most established names on the list. Her previous novels include the bestsellers Euphoria and Writers & Lovers.

The protagonist in Heart the Lover’s is in her senior year of college when she is swept into the intoxicating world of a couple of star students. Decades later, a surprise visit from the past forces her to confront the decisions of her youth.

Dominion by Addie E Citchens (Europa Editions UK)

Dominion by Addie E Citchens. (Source: generated using AI)

Addie E Citchens’ debut Dominion is a debut set in a fictional small town in Mississippi at the turn of the millennium.

Reverend Sabre Winfrey controls the Seven Seals Baptist Church, the local barbershop, and the radio station. He keeps an iron hand on every aspect of society in Dominion, Mississippi. His youngest son, Emanuel, known as Wonderboy, is the town’s golden child, however, an unexpected encounter sends shockwaves through the community.

The novel is told primarily through the eyes of Priscilla and Diamond, two women who are witness to their charms, and bear the brunt of their choices.

Citchens, who was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and studied at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson (Cassava Republic Press)

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson. (Generated using AI)

Marcia Hutchinson’s The Mercy Step was passed over more than 50 times before finding a home with Cassava Republic, a small Black-owned independent publisher.

Hutchinson is a British-Jamaican lawyer, community activist, and former Labour Councillor who became a full-time writer at the age of60.

The novel follows Mercy, a precocious young child in 1960s Bradford, raised by Windrush-generation Jamaican parents in a household dominated by her father’s temper and her mother’s devotion to the Church.

The protagonist finds solace in books and in the companionship of her beloved doll, Dolly, as she plots her escape. Judge Salma El-Wardany has called it “exceptional” from the very first page.

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly (Saraband)

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly (Source: Generated using AI)

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly centers on a creative writing academic who becomes infatuated with his colleague, an obsession that threatens his pre-existing relationship.

Kelly traces the narrator’s increasing fixation, which leads to the fraught family ties. The novel is one of the few on the shortlist to center a male protagonist, though the power dynamics the book interrogates are firmly in the prize’s tradition.

Kelly is a debut novelist from West Yorkshire in England and has won the 2024 NorthBound Book Award.

What is the Women’s Prize

The Women’s Prize was founded in response to the 1991 Booker Prize longlist, which featured no women at all. The omission galvanised a group of publishers and writers to create a prize for women writing in English regardless of nationality. Past winners include Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lionel Shriver, Maggie O’Farrell, and Barbara Kingsolver.

The winner will be announced on June 11 at the Women’s Prize Trust’s summer party in Bedford Square Gardens, London, and will receive £30,000 along with the prize’s bronze statuette, known as the Bessie.