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Kalayil, Majumdar in 2026 Women’s Prize longlist
The duo have found a place in the list of 16 for one of the 'greatest celebrations of female creativity in the world'.
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Jeffin T. Kaleekal - Wed, 04, Mar 2026
- 23:57 EST
- 30
Sheena Kalayil and Megha Majumdar / Women’s Prize for Fiction and Megha Majumdar
Megha Majumdar and Sheena Kalayil are among the authors longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, announced March 4.
The duo have found a place in the list of 16 for the prestigious British literary prize.
Founded in 1996, the Women’s Prize for Fiction honors the best English-language novel by a woman published in the UK, addressing gender imbalance in literature. The winner receives £30,000 and the Bessie statuette.
Kalayil, who has been nominated for 'The Others', is an author and teacher whose work has been molded by her nomadic upbringing, shuttling between India, Zambia and Zimbabwe. She has been living in the United Kingdom since 2002 and is currently teaching at the University of Manchester.
'The Others' is Kalayil’s fourth novel. Her debut novel, 'The Bureau of Second Chances', won her the Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel, and she was also shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Prize for Fiction with a Sense of Place.
ALSO READ: Indian politics in focus as ‘Grand Tamasha’ goes live in D.C.
Set in 1989 East Germany, 'The Others' revolves around Mozambican factory worker Armando, Indian medical student Lolita and East Berlin aspiring writer Theo, who form a close friendship that turns into a tense love triangle.
When Armando and Lolita uncover something gruesome, they become entangled in the regime’s politics as a revolution sweeps Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall begins to fall, forever altering their lives through love, deception and fear.
Megha Majumdar was nominated for 'A Guardian and a Thief'. Shaped by her early life in Kolkata, India, Majumdar is now a resident of New York.
An alumna of Harvard and Johns Hopkins, her debut novel, 'A Burning', was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. In India, it won a Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar.
Majumdar's long-listed work is set in a flood-ravaged Kolkata gripped by famine. The protagonist, Ma, and her family — her toddler Mishti and elderly father Dadu — are days away from escaping to America with hard-won visas when Ma’s purse, containing all their immigration documents, is stolen.
As Ma desperately hunts for the thief amid worsening hunger, the novel intertwines her story with that of Boomba, the desperate thief driven by love for his own family, revealing how far two households will go to protect their children’s futures in the face of catastrophe.
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