2026 Winner
We are thrilled to reveal that Hannah Kent, author of Always Home, Always Homesick (Picador, Pan Macmillan), is the winner of the 2026 Ilse Schwepcke Prize for women’s travel writing.
Hannah will receive £5,000 in a ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Hannah said: ‘I am absolutely delighted to have won the Ilse Schwepcke Prize for Women’s Travel Writing (for a book in English) for Always Home, Always Homesick. Books and travel writers taught me from a young age that the world was so much bigger than I could possibly imagine, and my life has been immeasurably expanded – and bettered – as a result. It is a great honour to be recognised within a genre that means so much to me on a deep and enduring personal level.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the late Ilse Schwepcke, and to Barbara Schwepcke and Karl-Burkhard Haus for this honour, and for all the work they do to support and encourage women travel writers. Thank you to the judges for your time and consideration, my publishers at Picador for your faith in this strange book of ghosts and belonging, and to Iceland for forever altering the trajectory of my life. Finally, my warmest congratulations to Marianne Jungmaier, and to all the shortlisted authors. I am deeply honoured. Vielen dank, hjartans þakkir, thank you.’
The jurors said:
“Born and raised in Australia, Hannah Kent launched herself at the tender age of 17 across the world to a country as different as from her home could be, and from which she returned changed forever. Always Home, Always Homesick: A Love Letter to Iceland is in part a memoir of this first journey to Iceland, of falling under the spell of its landscapes, and of the people who took her into their homes and lives. It’s also about her encounter with the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the C19th woman at the heart of Kent’s hugely successful novel Burial Rites. Cleaving to the friendships she made during repeated periods there, Kent has elaborated her ongoing Icelandic ventures into a work that layers her experiences with her inception as a writer. Her writing is crisp, very visual, often funny, and certainly transporting. A powerful and immensely enjoyable account of a deep, continuing engagement with people and place, that is also a celebration of reciprocity, of the to-and-fro of long and generous relationships. It is an absolute joy to read.”
Always Home, Always Homesick
When she was seventeen years old, Hannah Kent travelled to Iceland from Australia. She’d never seen snow before, didn’t speak a word of Icelandic. All she knew was that she wanted to have an experience – to soak up something of the world.
Soon she found herself isolated in a remote part of Iceland in a dark winter. It was a gruelling experience, but she quickly fell in love with the country: with its brutally beautiful landscapes and with its people. On returning home, with images of Iceland’s towering glaciers and windswept tundras in her dreams, Hannah began to write.
Now, as a mother and a wife, she looks back to that extraordinary year in Iceland, in Always Home, Always Homesick.