Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent has won the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award, given annually to “a debut novel of exceptional merit by an American author.”
Evans’ novel, published last May by Crown, follows Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired woman in her 70s who writes letters daily to a variety of people. After receiving letters from someone in her past, she is forced to come to terms with a painful period in her life. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “an affecting portrait of a prickly woman.”
The novel became an unexpected New York Times No. 1 bestseller, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
In a statement, the judges for the prize—Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro—said, “The Correspondent tells us it’s never too late to atone for the mistakes of the past. It’s never too late to fall in love. It is a compassionate, hopeful, moving novel, deftly structured and vividly characterized, especially prescient in our times and compelling in any.”
Evans said, “You write the best book you can. You hope you did justice on the page to the story you imagined. Then you send it out into the world dreaming that your readers will be transported in some way—to some place, some feeling, or some truth—but you don’t know. It is humbling to receive this award and to be in the ranks of such fine writers, and I am very grateful to the…judges for the honor.”
The PEN/Hemingway Award, which comes with a $10,000 cash prize, was established in 1976. Previous winners include Darcy O’Brien for A Way of Life, Like Any Other; Chang-rae Lee for Native Speaker; Yiyun Li for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; and Javier Fuentes for Countries of Origin.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
