Women's Prize for Fiction, 2026 winner

The Correspondent

Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in her seventies, keeps her life in order through letters — to her brother, her friends, her grown children, and to authors whose books she has opinions about. Told almost entirely through that correspondence over several years, the novel lets a prickly, private woman reveal by degrees the grief and regret she has kept from everyone, herself included. It is a quiet book about the late chance to change, and about how writing to others can become a way of being honest.

Book details About Virginia Evans

About the prize

Founded in 1996 to celebrate fiction by women, the prize has carried its sponsors’ names along the way — the Orange Prize until 2012 and the Baileys Women’s Prize from 2014 to 2017 — and is now the Women’s Prize for Fiction, run by the Women’s Prize Trust in London. A panel of five women judges announces a longlist of sixteen in spring, a shortlist of six in April and the winner in June. The winner receives £30,000 and a small bronze figure known as the Bessie.