Virginia Evans published her first novel, The Correspondent, in 2025, and built it entirely out of letters. Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired judge's law clerk in her seventies who writes daily — to her brother, to an old friend, to a university admissions office, to her estranged son, and to novelists including Joan Didion, some of whom write back. What she will not write about is the thing the letters keep circling. The epistolary form does the work that interiority usually does. Sybil is a witty, imperious and frequently unkind correspondent, and the reader assembles her marriage, her career, her losing eyesight and the accident at the centre of her life out of what she chooses to tell each recipient, and out of the gaps between the versions. Evans wrote the novel over several years while raising three children, and it sold at auction in a nine-way contest before publication in a long list of territories. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2026, an unusual outcome for a debut. She was born in 1986 and lives in Virginia.