Two Columbia Alums Longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction

Writing alums Alice Evelyn Yang '22 and Hannah Lillith Assadi '13—who is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing—are on the longlist for the 2026 Women Prize for Fiction for their novels A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing (William Morrow, 2026) and Paradiso 17 (Knopf, 2026), respectively. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is an annually awarded literary prize granted to a full-length English language novel written by a woman and is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the United Kingdom.

Yang’s A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is a work of historical fiction that uses magical realism to tell a story of family, violence, memory, and reunion. The novel follows Qianze Zhou, a twenty-five year old woman who is unexpectedly reunited with her father (Ba) eleven years after he abandoned her and her mother. Their reunion is met with a stasis as she attempts to make sense of his erratic behavior and his attempt to retrieve memories of his youth in China, memories he’s perhaps repressed, as well as attempting to receive a secret he’s desperate to share with her. Zhou must contend with Ba's mental state, determining if he really is suffering from a suppression of suffering, or if he’s manipulating her to maintain contact and continue to stay in her apartment in New York City. In addition to this confrontation, the novel maintains a non-chronological timeframe spanning a decade and four points of view, including Zhou’s mother and grandmother, Quanze and Ming. 

"Both the magical realism and the history are essential to the book’s stunning climax and auspicious ending," said journalist Marcie Geffner in The Washington Independent Review of Books. Alice Evelyn Yang is a Chinese-American writer from Northfolk, Virginia based in New York. Her work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, the Asian American writer’s workshop’s The Margins, The Rumpus, among other publications. She was the recipient of the 2022 Jesmyn Ward Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and while at Columbia she was awarded the Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship. A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is Yang’s debut novel, published by William Morrow, an imprint of Harper’s Collins. 

Assadi's Paradiso 17 is a story of a Palestinian man named Sufien. At the onset of the 1948 Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave his home, the only home he’s ever known, marking the period where "time stops making sense." From thereon, Sufien spends the rest of his life propelling forward, searching for something, though not entirely sure what. The novel brings him to an oil-rich desert of Kuwait, a small university town in Italy, New York City, and eventually Arizona. Throughout this narrative, Sufien encounters and falls in love, leaves his family, contends with the promise of the West, and eventually falls for a Jewish woman. It is a story and life that deals with questions of friendship, fatherhood, the prospect of freedom and an open road, the companionship of cats, prophetic dreams, visions of afterlife, and lessons learned during a stint selling leather at a tanner’s stall. 

Paradiso 17 weaves time and space, "beginning at the end and ending at the beginning," where Sufien approaches the end of his life with the knowledge and experience of a life lived brilliantly. Joy Williams, author of The Pelican Child, describes Paradiso 17 as "An intense, fearless, lyrical, and quite astonishing novel about the haunted apparitional life of a refugee." Assadi is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her past books include Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was also a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a piece of debut fiction. Assai’s second novel, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, was a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. In addition to teaching at Columbia, where she teaches classes in fiction, she also teaches at the Pratt Institute. Paradiso 17 is Assadi’s third novel, and will be published this March by Knopf. 

The winner of The Women’s Prize for Fiction receives a cash prize of 30,000 British Pounds. Past awardees of The Women’s Prize for Fiction include Ann Patchett for her novel Bel Canto, Zadie Smith for On Beauty, and Maggie O’Farrell for Hamnet. 

You can purchase A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing here and Paradiso 17 here.