This event is part of Letters Home, our series of curated programs celebrating the many ways we imagine, remember, and return to home from afar.
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Join Virginia Evans for a conversation about her acclaimed debut novel, The Correspondent, a moving testament to the power of the written word. Through the story of an avid letter writer whose correspondence becomes the archive of a life, Evans explores memory, family, forgiveness, and the enduring connections forged through letters across generations.
About the speaker:
Virginia Evans’ debut novel The Correspondent is a #1 New York Times bestselling novel that has sold in more than 25 countries. Raised on the East Coast of the United States, she attended James Madison University for her bachelor’s in English literature, as well as Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, for her masters of philosophy in creative writing. She lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her husband, two children, and her Red Labrador, Brigid.
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, including Albanian, French, Latvian, Polish, Mongolian, and Vietnamese.
