Books that have won the women’s prize for fiction

The Women’s Prize for Fiction is a UK-based literary prize celebrating novels by women authors.

After the Booker Prize shortlist of 1991 included only men, a diverse group of reviewers, agents, publishers, and booksellers gathered to discuss the purpose of prizes and what could be done to tip the scales.

The group established that it was of utmost importance to bring women writers to the public’s attention, and thus the idea for the Women’s Prize for Fiction was born. It took a few more years of research and searching for sponsorship before the first official prize was awarded in 1996 to Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter.

Since then, the Women’s Prize for Fiction has continued to platform women authors from around the world and become one of the most prestigious literary prizes.

Outside the prize, the Women’s Prize Trust continues to champion women writers with its programs, support, and podcast.

Penguin Random House is delighted to announce we have four titles longlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction in 2026.

• Wild Dark Shore - Charlotte McConaghy
• Audition – Katie Kitamura
• The Correspondent - Katie Kitamura
• Flashlight – Susan Choi

About the shortlisted books

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realises Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

Audition by Katie Kitmura

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

In her letters to family and friends we come to know the life of Sybil Van Antwerp: stubborn, cantankerous, opinionated, always steadfast in her belief in the power of the written word.

But as the clock begins to tick for Sybil, the need for a few post-scripts to the life she’s led becomes apparent. Fixing her difficult relationship with her children. Taking a final chance at romance. Atoning for an old legal case which has come back to haunt her. And finally, reckoning with a devastating loss that she has spent the last thirty years holding close to her chest.

Flashlight by Susan Choi

The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned.

The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels.