The Correspondent and The Finest Hotel in Kabul: The 2026 Women’s Prize winners reviewed

Antwerp also writes to a university president, friends and family (“I RAN OVER THEODORE LUBECK’S CAT WITH MY CAR”), to the editor‑in‑chief (“Shame on you!”), and to her favourite author, Kazuo Ishiguro. But she also writes regularly to one person, but never presses send.

That Evans does not polish these emails and allows them to breathe with typos, different fonts, sizes and spacing, formatting errors, and all, lends an air of authenticity to the novel making it a pleasurable snoop through an eccentric elederly woman’s correspondence. One imagines that iconic 88-year-old actor-activist Jane Fonda agrees as she will be playing Antwerp in the film adaptation of the novel.

Most of the world learnt of The Correspondent largely at the tail end of October 2025, when this debut, written by a little-known author became a breakout sleeper hit, solely by word of mouth. Soon renowned critics were reviewing the book, literary journalists were interviewing her, and the book and its author were topping bestseller, best debut and best fiction lists for New York Times, Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Goodreads, to name a few.

Julia Gillard, Chair of Judges for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, called the winning novel, “a remarkable novel, with an exemplary combination of originality, excellence and accessibility.”

“It is no mean feat to write a life in letters, but Evans makes this feel effortless, asking the reader to consider the choices we make, whilst elevating an ordinary life in the most heartfelt of ways,” Gillard writes. “The sheer skill required to render an emotionally resonant and engaging work in this format is spectacular.”

Women’s Prize 2026 winners Virginia Evans author of The Correspondent and Canadian journalist Lyse Doucet. (Courtesy: womensprize.com)

‘The Finest Hotel in Kabul’

What makes a statue, hotel, tomb, or garden a cultural monument for a people? Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, finds parallels between Afghanistan and the Inter-Continental Hotel, the country’s first luxury hotel, where she has been checking in since 1988 in her Women’s Prize winning book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul (non-fiction).

The hotel, which opened in 1969, has seen “Soviet occupation, multiple coups, civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban,” the Penguin Random House book description reads. But, it is far from a dry chronology, it is a narrative of a people, through vignettes such as shooting at a wedding, Kalashnikovs inching around the hotel, staff finding and clumps of hair and flesh in rooms after a vicious attack, and how eventually the front desk of the hotel was taken over by Taliban recruits.

Thangam Debbonaire, Chair of Judges for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, calls The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet “a perfect work of narrative non-fiction,” praising it for its clever construction, research, sensitivity and warmth.

“It will move you to tears or make you laugh, or perhaps both. Informed by decades of excellent reporting, Doucet centres the real-life experiences of people – the staff and guests, alongside the hotel itself – and with the future of Afghanistan still being written, this book’s importance will only get stronger as the years go by,” Debbonaire said. It is a must read.