‘We can’t give up on Afghans’: Lyse Doucet on the remarkable ‘people’s history’ that won her the Women’s prize

The BBC’s chief international correspondent was awarded the prestigious nonfiction prize for The Finest Hotel in Kabul – which she hopes will bring more attention to the Taliban’s draconian treatment of women

• Women’s prize: Virginia Evans wins for fiction and Lyse Doucet takes award for nonfiction

Lyse Doucet first checked into Kabul’s 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.

More than three decades later, it became the subject of her first book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, which has now won the Women’s prize for nonfiction. But while the prize recognises a remarkable work of reportage and history, the BBC’s chief international correspondent is more interested in what it might do for the country that inspired it.