Women\u2019s prize: Virginia Evans wins for fiction and Lyse Doucet takes award for nonfiction<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Lyse Doucet first checked into Kabul\u2019s Intercontinental Hotel on Christmas Day 1988, as Soviet troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan at the end of a decade-long occupation. She expected to stay briefly. Instead, she remained for almost a year, and the hotel became her first Afghan home.<\/p>\n More than three decades later, it became the subject of her first book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul<\/a>, which has now won the Women\u2019s prize for nonfiction<\/a>. But while the prize recognises a remarkable work of reportage and history, the BBC\u2019s chief international correspondent is more interested in what it might do for the country that inspired it.<\/p>\n
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