The 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, announced on March 4, includes 16 novels, with two by authors of Indian heritage: Sheena Kalayil’s The Others and Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief. The selection highlights nine books from independent publishers and seven debuts, alongside works by Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura. Chaired by Julia Gillard, the judging panel praised the books for addressing contemporary issues like climate change and artificial intelligence.
The longlist for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction was revealed on March 4, comprising 16 titles that span international settings and themes. Among them are novels by Manchester-based Sheena Kalayil and New York-based Megha Majumdar, both of Indian origin. Kalayil’s The Others, her fourth book, is set in East Berlin during the final days of the Berlin Wall, exploring how political upheaval affects the lives of three friends. Kalayil, 55, was born in Zambia to parents from Kerala, India, and has worked in countries including Mozambique and Spain before settling in the UK. Her debut, The Bureau of Second Chances, won the Writers’ Guild Best First Novel Award in 2018.
Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief, her second novel, depicts a future Kolkata stricken by flooding and famine. It follows a mother called Ma, whose climate visas are stolen by teenager Boomba, displaced from his coastal village. The narrative alternates between their perspectives over one week. Majumdar, 37, grew up in Kolkata and studied anthropology at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities. Her debut A Burning was a 2020 New York Times bestseller, earning the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2021 and a Whiting Award in 2022. The new book was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award and shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize. A review in The Indian Express by Aakash Joshi noted, “At times, it feels as though the book is so desperate to touch on the right themes and characters — climate change, selfishness, a billionaire that’s forced in, the capriciousness of American power and the power of its ‘dream’, NRI longing for home — that it loses itself.”
The all-female judging panel, chaired by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, includes Mona Arshi, Salma El-Wardany, Cariad Lloyd, and Annie Macmanus. Gillard stated, “Across a longlist that is international in both scope and setting, these sixteen books demonstrate the power of fiction to examine the messy business of being human. From climate change to artificial intelligence, they navigate the issues of our time with urgency and purpose.”
The full longlist, in alphabetical order by author surname, is: Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps (Weatherglass Books); Paradiso by Hannah Lillith Assadi (4th Estate, HarperCollins); Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Atlantic Books); Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape, Vintage); Dominion by Addie E. Citchens (Europa Editions UK); The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (Sceptre, Hachette UK); The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House UK); The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson (Cassava Republic Press); The Others by Sheena Kalayil (Fly on the Wall Press); Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly (Saraband); Heart the Lover by Lily King (Canongate); Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press, Vintage); A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Scribner, Simon & Schuster); Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Canongate); The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal (Tinder Press, Headline); A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang (Dead Ink).
A shortlist of six will be announced on April 22, with the winner revealed on June 11 in London, receiving £30,000 and the Bessie statuette.
