Virginia Evans and Lyse Doucet win Women's Prize book awards

LONDON (AP) — American novelist Virginia Evans won the Women’s Prize for Fiction on Thursday with “The Correspondent,” a word-of-mouth bestseller that made her a literary star after seven unpublished novels.

Canadian journalist Lyse Doucet won the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction with “The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan.”

Both prizes come with a 30,000 pound ($40,000) purse and are open to female English-language writers from any country.

Evans wrote fiction for two decades before writing “The Correspondent" during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was released quietly in 2025. A story told through years’ worth of letters from retired lawyer Sybil Van Antwerp to friends, family and famous writers, it gradually climbed bestseller lists and became a book club favorite. A film adaptation starring Jane Fonda is in the works.

Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who chaired the fiction judging panel, said the novel “captured our hearts” by “elevating an ordinary life in the most heartfelt of ways.”

Evans said she “developed a very thick skin for rejection and failure” during the years of writing without getting published.

“Why did I keep going? I didn’t know how not to, I guess,” she told The Associated Press.

“I was writing the book that I wanted to read,” she added. “I guess the book that I was wanting to read was the book a lot of people were wanting to read.”

She said “The Correspondent” is in part a cry against the loss of handwritten letters — “the real tale of history” — in our digital age.

“If you want to know what happened somewhere, you need to read somebody saying to their mom, ‘This is what happened to me today,'" she said. "And so I feel a grief about that. There’s something I probably was reaching for when I was writing the book, which was the preservation of the memory of that.”

Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, profiles staff and guests of Kabul’s once-glamorous Inter-Continental Hotel — scarred but still standing — to provide a microcosm of Afghanistan’s turbulent recent history.

Labour Party politician Thangam Debbonaire, head of the nonfiction jury, called it “a perfect work of narrative non-fiction” that is “informed by decades of excellent reporting.”

Doucet, who has been visiting Afghanistan as a journalist since the 1980s, said she wrote the book to provide a fuller picture than the “snapshot” of news coverage allows.

“My experience from decades of covering countries and people in the hardest of times is that people still have to get up every day and find an everyday courage to get through the day,” she said. "And even in the darkest of places … people find humor to bring light, they try to live with hope to bring some kind of relief and they try to live with humanity.”

Previous winners of the fiction prize, founded in 1996, include Zadie Smith, Tayari Jones and Barbara Kingsolver.

The sister prize for nonfiction was founded in 2024 to help redress a gender imbalance in publishing. In 2022, only 26.5% of nonfiction books reviewed in Britain’s newspapers were by women, and male writers dominated established nonfiction writing prizes.

Last year’s nonfiction winner was British physician Rachel Clarke’s account of an organ transplant, “The Story of a Heart.”

Virginia Evans holding her book The Correspondent, poses for a photograph at the Women's Prize Trust Summer Party & Awards Ceremony for the 2026 in London, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Virginia Evans, left, and Lyse Doucet winners of The Women's Prize for fiction, left, and nonfiction, pose for a photograph at the 2026 Women's Prize Trust Summer Party & Awards Ceremony in London, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Virginia Evans, winner of The Women's Prize for fiction, poses for a photograph at the 2026 Women's Prize Trust Summer Party & Awards Ceremony in London, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Lyse Doucet, winner of The Women's Prize for nonfiction, poses for a photograph at the Women's Prize Trust Summer Party & Awards Ceremony for the 2026, in London, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Virginia Evans, right, and Lyse Doucet winners of The Women's Prize for fiction and nonfiction, left, pose for a photograph at the 2026 Women's Prize Trust Summer Party & Awards Ceremony in London, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Lyse Doucet holding her book The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan, poses for a photograph at the 2026 Women's Prize Trust Summer Party & Awards Ceremony in London, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Virginia Evans holding her book The Correspondent, poses for a photograph at the 2026 Women's Prize Trust Summer Party & Awards Ceremony in London, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

BOSTON (AP) — A jury Thursday convicted the brother of Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell of sexually assaulting women while he posed as a rideshare driver.

Jurors found Alvin Campbell, 45, guilty of 21 out of 22 counts for sex assaults from 2017 to 2019, the Suffolk County district attorney's office said. The jury was deadlocked on one of the rape charges.

“We will determine our action, if any, at a future date on that charge,” the district attorney's office said in a statement.

Campbell faces up to life in prison for aggravated rape when he is sentenced on June 29.

Campbell posed as a rideshare driver to target women outside bars or other locations, prosecutors said.

His younger sister became the first woman of color to win statewide office in Massachusetts when she was sworn in as attorney general in 2023. A spokesperson for the attorney general's office didn't immediately return an email from The Associated Press late Thursday seeking comment on the verdict.

Andrea Campbell has spoken previously about her family's troubled history in the criminal justice system, including her brother's rape charges.

“One thing I do frequently is share my story because I think there are so many who carry their story with a sense of shame and don’t want to talk about it, including the criminal aspects of my family,” she said in a previous interview with the AP. “But there is no shame in one sharing their story. There is power in it.”

The attorney general is the chief lawyer and law enforcement officer in the state.

After the verdict, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden told reporters he hadn't spoken with the attorney general.

Alvin Campbell “deceivingly and calculatedly” preyed upon women in their most vulnerable moments, Hayden said. “I can't imagine what that horror must have been like for them.”

Campbell's defense attorney didn't immediately respond to a phone message and email from the AP.

Hayden expressed gratitude to the women who testified: “We’re happy that we were able to secure justice and accountability for them and so we thank them.”

FILE- Alvin Campbell Jr. sits at the defense table during his sexual assault trial, in Suffolk Superior Court, in Boston, May 18, 2026. (Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool, File)