Virginia Evans wins Women's Prize after seven rejected
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- Virginia Evans won this year's Women's Prize for her debut novel The Correspondent, an epistolary novel about 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp that she wrote in a closet during the 2020 pandemic and which spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
- Evans had completed seven unpublished novels before this one, having written daily from 5am to 7am since age 19 and received 'thousands of rejections' before Canadian agent Hilary McMahon agreed to represent her.
- The Correspondent is being adapted into a film with Jane Fonda attached to play Sybil, and Evans will serve as producer with a cameo appearance, having been congratulated at the prize party by Notting Hill writer-director Richard Curtis.
- Evans drew the novel's structure from Helene Hanff's 1970 memoir 84 Charing Cross Road and used John Williams's Stoner as a template for transforming an unremarkable life into quietly devastating fiction, including fictional letters to real authors like Joan Didion and Ann Patchett, who became her pen pal and supporter.
- The novel's treatment of grief was shaped by the death of a six-year-old son of close friends; Evans made the character's dead son eight, the same age as her own son Jack at the time, and included the boy, Wade, in the acknowledgments at his parents' request.
- Evans can now write full-time, working from a new 'little porch' instead of the closet, and is well into her next novel about making a movie.
Why it matters: Evans's path—seven rejected manuscripts, 21 years of 5am writing sessions, and a word-of-mouth bestseller—frames The Correspondent as a counter-narrative to overnight-success mythology in publishing, while the Jane Fonda film deal and full-time writing gig mark a material shift for a novelist who had been working barista and paralegal jobs to support her family.
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