Category Awards and prizes

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Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Sixteen novels are in contention for the £30,000 award, now in its 31st year, with settings ranging from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata

Katie Kitamura, Susan Choi, Kit de Waal and Lily King are among the authors longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.

Awarded annually and now in its 31st year, the prize comes with £30,000, and is one of the most prominent accolades for women’s writing in the English language. The 16-strong list features a selection of novels that range in setting from climate-ravaged islands to a near-future Kolkata, and from 1970s Birmingham to East Berlin on the brink of reunification.

To browse all books in the Women’s prize for fiction 2026 longlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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‘These books are pushing boundaries’: winners of £30,000 Inclusive Books for Children awards announced

Supa Nova by Chanté Timothy, a graphic novel about a young Black girl with a love for science, won the children’s fiction category and inaugural children’s choice prize

Six female authors have been crowned winners of the 2026 Inclusive Books for Children (IBC) awards.

The literacy charity’s prizes celebrate the best UK-published inclusive titles for children aged one to nine. This year marks the second time that all the winners have been women since the prizes were launched in 2023.

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Witches, Nazi collaborators and banned books: International Booker prize announces 2026 longlist

Thirteen books make this year’s longlist for translated fiction, which awards a first prize of £50,000

Olga Ravn, Daniel Kehlmann, Ia Genberg, Mathias Énard and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara are among those longlisted for the 10th International Booker prize, which recognises the best translated fiction published in the past year.

A “Booker dozen” of 13 books were longlisted for this year’s prize. One author-translator pair will win £50,000, to be split equally.

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Arundhati Roy and Sarah Perry longlisted for Women’s prize for nonfiction

Sixteen authors – including Lea Ypi, Lyse Doucet and Barbara Demick – are in contention for the £30,000 award, launched to address a historic gender imbalance in nonfiction prizes

Arundhati Roy, Sarah Perry and Lea Ypi are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Sixteen authors are in contention to win the £30,000 award, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

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‘There is a sense of things careening towards a head’: TS Eliot prize winner Karen Solie

The Canadian poet, whose winning collection explores environmental and personal loss, discusses making art in existential times

Early on in her latest collection, the Canadian poet Karen Solie apologises: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.” The line appears in a poem, Red Spring, about agribusiness and its sinister human impact: the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, is “advertised as non-persistent; but tell that to Dewayne Johnson // and his non-Hodgkin lymphoma”. In 2018, a jury ruled that Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkiller, Roundup, caused the former groundskeeper’s cancer.

Solie’s admission – that real horror can’t be prettified – recalls Noor Hindi’s viral 2020 poem, Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying. We can’t “treat poetry like it’s some kind of separate thing” to what’s going on around us, says Solie, speaking to me in Soho, London, the morning after finding out she has won the TS Eliot prize for her collection Wellwater. “We all have to keep our eyes open”, but “that doesn’t mean we can’t say we’re scared, because it’s scary”.

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£15,000 prize launched for writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds

The Footnote x Counterpoints prize is intended to uncover new literary voices whose work reflects the experiences of migration

Footnote Press and Counterpoints Arts have announced a new fiction award celebrating writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds, offering a £15,000 prize and a publishing deal for the winner.

The Footnote x Counterpoints prize for fiction, launching on Thursday, marks the second time the two organisations have collaborated on a prize. In 2023, writers were invited to submit narrative nonfiction, but now the prize will focus on fiction for the first time.

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The Artist by Lucy Steeds wins Waterstones book of the year

The debut novel took the top prize while The Café at the Edge of the Woods by Mikey Please was named children’s book of the year

The Artist by Lucy Steeds has been named this year’s Waterstones book of the year.

The novel, which is set in 1920s Provence and blends mystery with a love story, also took home the Waterstones debut fiction prize earlier this year, and was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction.

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Ncuti Gatwa leads star winners at first Speakies awards for audio storytelling

The actor won best performance for BBC drama Gatsby in Harlem at the inaugural British Audio awards, while Nicola Coughlan’s narration of Juno Dawson’s Queen B clinched best sci-fi audiobook

Audiobooks narrated by Ncuti Gatwa, Nicola Coughlan and David Tennant were among those recognised at the inaugural British Audio awards, the “Speakies”.

Gatwa’s performance in the lead role of Gatsby in Harlem helped it emerge as one of Monday evening’s biggest winners: it took three major prizes including audio of the year. The reimagining of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby also won best audio drama adaptation, while Gatwa took home the best performance award for what organisers described as his “remarkable poise and flair” in capturing Gatsby’s character.

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‘It’s notoriously hard to write about sex’: David Szalay on Flesh, his astounding Booker prize-winner

The novel’s protagonist is violent, libidinous and so inarticulate he says ‘OK’ some 500 times. So how did the author turn his story into a tragic masterpiece?

When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year’s Booker prize, David Szalay, the winner, seems an extremely genial and gentle author to have created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in recent contemporary fiction. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you have read before.

Szalay (pronounced “Sol-oy”) is often described as “Hungarian-British”, but that has offended Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years earlier. “I’m arguably more Canadian than Hungarian.” Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make things more confusing, he is over from Vienna, where he now lives with his wife and young son Jonathan.

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The risky strategy of Booker winner Flesh pays off

The protagonist’s inner life is hidden from the reader in this highly original novel

Reflecting on the Booker judging process, chair Roddy Doyle stressed the “singularity” of Flesh, the most unusual novel on the shortlist. In his sixth book, Hungarian-British writer David Szalay takes a classic story arc – one man’s journey through life, from childhood to old age – and presents it in a radically new and challenging way, scooping out the interiority that usually powers the novel form.

We meet his protagonist, István, as a bored 15-year-old in a Hungarian backwater. He is seduced by a middle-aged neighbour into a relationship suffused with shame and disgust; a confused act of violence knocks his life off course; he joins the military and is stationed in Kuwait; he moves to London and works as a bouncer before the rising tides of global capital carry him, for a while, into the monied elite. And all the while, we are cut off from his thoughts, emotions and motivations: we see only how others react to him, desire him, fear him. The most we tend to hear from István himself is a bland, noncommittal “OK”.

Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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