Virginia Evans

Virginia Evans is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling novel The Correspondent. The novel constructs a narrative through letters and emails to and from Sybil van Antwerp as she ages and loses her sight, some sent, others unsent creating a shifting view of her past and future. Ann Patchett called it “A cause for celebration,” Booklist called it “Charming, engrossing, and deeply moving” in their star review, and Anne Griffin called the novel "a masterclass in how to exquisitely put words on human frailty" in her review for The Irish Times.

The Correspondent won the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the inaugural James Patterson & Bookshop.org Prize which celebrates debut authors, and the Indies Choice Book Award for Adult Fiction. It was a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Elle, Christian Science Monitor, Amazon, She Reads, and was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick. It was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal. The Correspondent has been translated into more than 35 languages, from Albanian, French, and Latvian to Polish, Mongolian, and Vietnamese. The Correspondent is being developed into a movie starring Jane Fonda by Lionsgate.  

Evans received her bachelor’s degree in English literature from James Madison University and later earned a Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, where she studied under Carlo Gébler, Eoin McNamee, Claire Keegan, Harry Clifton, and Kevin Power. She lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her husband, their two children, and their Red Labrador, Brigid, where she continues to write fiction that explores the extraordinary dimensions of seemingly ordinary lives.

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