The Women’s prize for fiction has been awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best novel written in English since 1996. In its 30th year, it is now one of the most influential literary awards in the world.
The 2026 shortlist explores themes of power, agency, ageing and connection. The list reflects the prize’s drive to support new and emerging female talent with four debuts.
Here we have enlisted six experts to guide you through the nominations for 2026.
Flashlight by Susan Choi
Susan Choi’s Flashlight opens with a disorienting event. Ten-year-old Louisa and her father Serk walk along a seaside breakwater at dusk, a flashlight in hand. By morning, Louisa is found, barely alive. Serk is missing and presumed drowned. Instead of offering immediate answers, the novel follows three intertwined lives – Serk, Louisa and Anne – across continents and decades.
What begins as a mystery expands into intimate family drama that takes in broader historical shifts, spanning across the Pacific and from the 1970s onwards. Serk, an ethnic Korean born in Japan, emigrates to the US and navigates a life shaped by statelessness and historical upheaval. Anne, Louisa’s American mother, embodies another thread of rupture and inheritance. Together, their stories form a constellation of absence and unresolved loss.
Choi illuminates the hidden currents of identity, migration and disappearance with remarkable skill. Flashlight is an ambitious, emotionally resonant work that rewards close reading.
Sojin Lim is a reader in Asia Pacific studies
The Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly
Kingfisher follows an unnamed narrator and the transformation of his most important relationships – with his lover, his partner, his mother and a friend – by loss. First, his mother’s death puts strain on these connections, and then later the death of his lover. Each of these ties is messy and complex, and, through their depiction, Kelly offers a lyrical meditation on love, power and desire.
When the narrator is briefly united with his partner near the novel’s close, he describes their sex as his “kintsugi” – a reference to the Japanese art of repair that leaves cracks visible. The ethos of kintsugi also surfaces in his lover’s celebration of the scars from her treatment for breast cancer.
The novel can productively be read as an extended reflection on grief through the lens of kintsugi, both in its reparative approach that nevertheless retains the traces of damage, and in its vision of art as creating beauty from fracture and loss.
Anne Whitehead is a professor of modern and contemporary literature
Heart the Lover by Lily King
The title and cover advertising suggest a pacy, contemporary romance, but Heart the Lover is not genre fiction. It is a story about how the protagonist navigates the condition of loving two boyfriends, her husband, her mother, a baby and two sons. It is also a feminist lament on passivity: despite intelligence and confidence, the narrator cultivates a resilience that is bruising. Holding back information and suppressing emotion is its core message.
The protagonist feels like a friend, someone we care deeply about but never know entirely – even her real name is withheld until the novel’s final line. She is known by nicknames from The Great Gatsby, one of many literary references her college friends make in the novel’s formative chapters.
She’s called “Daisy” (the name Sam and Yash, her classmates and afterwards boyfriends, give all their dates) after Gatsby’s love interest Daisy Buchanan; then, for her daring and wit, Jordan after the cynical Jordan Baker. Above all, the novel evokes William Faulkner: sparse, direct, quotidian and deeply emotional. For different reasons, I could recommend Heart the Lover to everyone I know.
Jenni Ramone is an associate professor of postcolonial and global literatures
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
Citchens’ first novel explores patriarchy and female agency within a small Black community in Mississippi. Rooted in the traditions of the American South and reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in its portrayal of female empowerment and resilience, Dominion feels strikingly contemporary, offering a sharp critique of modern forms of masculine authority sustained through family, church and community.
The novel questions the sanctity of marriage, motherhood, sexuality and personal freedom through two contrasting narrators: Priscilla, a reverend’s wife and mother of four grown sons, and Diamond, a 17-year-old navigating a troubled relationship with Priscilla’s wayward son, Wonderboy.
Interspersed between these narratives are sermon notes prepared by Priscilla for her husband, each headed by the refrain, “I’m just a nobody trying to tell everybody about somebody who can save anybody.” These dated entries create a subtle countdown towards Priscilla’s liberation and Wonderboy’s eventual reckoning. This is an intelligent and timely debut.
Manjeet Ridon is an associate dean international in arts, design and humanities
The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson
The Mercy Step is a singular and transfixing work of fiction. From the opening account of Mercy’s experience of her own birth in 1962, the novel’s close third person (using “he,” “she,” or “they” pronouns, but restricted to internal thoughts, feelings, and experiences of just one character, in this case Mercy) voices a confronting and spirited coming-of-age novel.
Hutchinson plunges the reader into the interior life of Mercy, a Bradford-Jamaican girl seeking to survive her father’s attacks inside the home and racism outside. While Mercy’s precocious intelligence and moral ferocity are to be enjoyed and admired, her acoustic and visual exactness cannot be separated from her anxious vigilance around overshadowing violence.
Likewise, her superpower version of herself, crushed by any failure, is deeply entangled with her desperate desire to rescue her mother from an abusive marriage. Chastised for “pushing herself into big people business”, Mercy’s options for innocence are literally imaginary. And yet it is in her ability to sustain and replenish her dreams and defiance that the novel triumphs.
Alison Donnell is a professor of modern literatures in English
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
The Correspondent offers a compassionate look at self-sufficiency, intimacy and care as we age. Through the form of letters, with all their gaps, silences and careful wording, Virginia Evans builds a portrait of a life shaped by correspondence: connection and distance at once.
Through Sybil’s sharp, generous voice, the novel is never static; instead it gathers emotional weight across time, revealing loss, desire and frailty alongside wit and resilience. As her sight fails, the very practice that has structured her life, writing, becomes uncertain; control is renegotiated. This raises questions that feel urgent for all of us: how do we live and support one another as we age? How does disability concern not just some people, but everyone’s future? And how does the way we communicate shift over a lifetime?
Paty Paliokosta is an associate professor of special and inclusive education
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