Lyse Doucet wins the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2026
The BBC's chief international correspondent won the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction with The Finest Hotel in Kabul, her first book.
Lyse Doucet won the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan, announced on 11 June 2026 in London. She receives £30,000. Doucet is a Canadian journalist and the BBC's chief international correspondent, and this is her first book.
The book uses the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul as a frame for a social history of modern Afghanistan, following the people who have passed through it over decades of war and political change.
The judges were chaired by Thangam Debbonaire, with Roma Agrawal, Nicola Elliott, Nina Stibbe and Nicola Williams. The other shortlisted books were Art Cure by Daisy Fancourt, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell, Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska, Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy and Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran.
Journalists often carry a book's worth of material for years before writing it. Doucet's win shows the value of finding a single, concrete frame, here a building, to hold a very large subject. It is an approach that many writers of narrative non-fiction could borrow, whatever their subject.
Sources: Women's Prize: Announcing the 2026 winners of the Women's Prizes; Wikipedia: Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.