The official winners announcement said Evans won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel The Correspondent. It said Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan.
Each winner receives GBP30,000, according to the Women’s Prize Trust. Evans also receives the fiction prize statuette known as the Bessie, while Doucet receives the nonfiction prize’s Charlotte sculpture.
The prize body described The Correspondent as a novel composed of letters to friends, family and real-life authors, centred on 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp. It attributed the fiction judges’ assessment to Julia Gillard, the former Australian prime minister who chaired the 2026 fiction panel.
The Trust described Doucet’s nonfiction book as a recent history of modern Afghanistan built around Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel and the people who lived and worked there. It attributed the nonfiction judges’ assessment to Thangam Debbonaire, chair of the 2026 nonfiction judging panel.
The Guardian also reported on 11 June that Evans and Doucet had won the two awards, identifying the same winning books. AP reported that Evans won for a novel made up of letters by a retired lawyer and that Doucet’s book follows lives connected to Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel.
The fiction shortlist included Marcia Hutchinson’s The Mercy Step, Rozie Kelly’s Kingfisher, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion, Lily King’s Heart the Lover and Susan Choi’s Flashlight, according to independent coverage of the award. The nonfiction shortlist included books by Daisy Fancourt, Judith Mackrell, Jane Rogoyska, Ece Temelkuran and Arundhati Roy.