Virginia Evans and Lyse Doucet Win Women's Prize for Fiction and Nonfiction

Double Win for Debut Authors at Women's Prize

Debut novelist Virginia Evans has won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, while the BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet took home the nonfiction award, also for her debut.

Evans' 'The Correspondent' Takes Fiction Award

Evans’s The Correspondent and Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul were announced as the winners at a ceremony in central London on Thursday evening, with each author awarded £30,000.

Julia Gillard, former Australian prime minister and chair of judges for the fiction award, described The Correspondent as “a remarkable novel, with an exemplary combination of originality, excellence and accessibility”, adding that it “captured our hearts, and should be read and savoured by all”.

Doucet's 'The Finest Hotel in Kabul' Wins Nonfiction

Canadian journalist Doucet puts the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul at the centre of her “people’s history” of modern Afghanistan. She charts the lives of the people who pass through the hotel, where she stayed while reporting from the country as a foreign correspondent, against a backdrop of decades of war and political upheaval.

William Dalrymple, reviewing the book for the Guardian, described it as “witty, observant and sometimes heartbreaking”, adding that Doucet “succeeds in making the hotel an oddly successful frame for a sweeping social history of Afghanistan over the last half century”.

The Judges' Perspectives

Thangam Debbonaire, former Labour MP and nonfiction chair of judges, described Doucet's book as “a perfect work of narrative nonfiction … cleverly constructed and brilliantly researched”, adding that “it will move you to tears or make you laugh, or perhaps both”.

About the Women's Prize

The creation of the Women’s prize for nonfiction in 2023 was prompted by research that found only 35.5% of winners across seven major UK nonfiction awards over the previous decade were women.