Women's Prize for Fiction winner on The Safekeep, being intersex and her childhood in Israel
It sounds like a hectic afternoon in London when I speak to
Yael van der Wouden
, author of
The Safekeep
and winner last Thursday of this year's
Women's Prize for Fiction
. Speaking on Friday, she says life since hearing she had won the prestigious British literary award and its £30,000 (€35,000) prize has been 'like this, absolutely chaotic', referring to the sirens and beeping noises intruding through the open window.
'It was unreal,' says van der Wouden. 'You prepare yourself for every single scenario and you try to imagine how you would feel with every single scenario, but you can't.'
Beyond promoting her work, 'I just get to live my life,' says the Dutch-Israeli author. 'The Netherlands is a very sober country, so no one goes into any kind of heightened emotion over an author existing.'
'It's good because I come here and they give me prizes and then I go home and I'm just a lady in a store,' she says.
READ MORE
Van der Wouden's debut was up against stiff competition for the prize, including novels by established American writers Elizabeth Strout and Miranda July, along with three other debuts: The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis and Good Girl by Aria Aber.
In her acceptance speech, van der Wouden shared that she was intersex. 'I was a girl until I turned 13, and then as I hit puberty all that was supposed to happen did not quite happen, or if it did happen it happened too much,' she said. 'I won't thrill you too much with the specifics but the long and the short of it is that hormonally I am intersex.
[
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden: Beguiling love story told in language that entertains and enthrals
Opens in new window
]
'This little fact defined my life throughout my teens until I advocated for the healthcare that I needed.
'In the few precious moments here on stage I am receiving truly the greatest honour of my life as a woman, presenting to you as a woman and accepting this Women's Prize and that is because of every single trans person who's fought for healthcare, who changed the system, the law, societal standards, themselves. I stand on their shoulders.'
What prompted her to share this information? 'To me, that's an integral part of my life and the conversations I have with myself, with my friends and family, with my trans loved ones,' she says. So why now? 'Because it just happened to be that the moment where I and a room full of 800 people met for the first time and so they got to hear me speak for the first time. But it's not anything new on my part. It simply was a new moment for all of us together.'
Creativity comes from curiosity. And when you're in survival mode, there's no space for curiosity
The Safekeep, which also made the Booker Prize shortlist last year, is based on a repressed and melancholic central character, Isabel, whose world is upended when her brother's girlfriend, Ava, stays with her for the summer. A passionate love affair develops between the women, leading to a thrilling plot twist that van der Wouden asks me to be careful not to reveal. It is not exposing too much to say the novel, set in the Netherlands in 1961, concerns itself with the legacy of the second World War.
Does she think there might be a through-line between how the Dutch government of the time treated Jewish people during the war and its contemporary policies under its right-wing government? 'The Netherlands has a specific penchant in using bureaucracy as a form of violence, against migrants, immigrants, refugees, poor people, marginalised people.
'This happened in the fallout of the war, this happened with every single migrant crisis that the country has had, and this specifically happened also around what we call the 'toeslagenaffaire'.' This was
a scandal
in which Dutch tax authorities used an algorithm to spot suspected benefits fraud. It penalised many low-income, ethnic-minority families.
'And that's what I mean with using bureaucracy as a form of violence: using the minutiae of forms and documents and having people fill in that and fill in that ... the small things that you don't think represent violence and end up creating so much suffering for so many people.
'I don't think [the Netherlands] is unique in that, but I can only speak to my country,' she adds.
Being an artist in the Netherlands is more difficult than ever, she says, with funding being 'slashed' in education and the arts. She says her parents, both of whom are animators, received a universal income when they moved to the Netherlands, where her father is from, when van der Wouden was 10, after the family had spent the first decade of her life living in her mother's native Israel.
She is now in the very privileged position of being an author who can live off her work, she says, but all of her friends working in education and the arts are struggling. 'They are all splitting themselves in so many ways just to make ends meet and it's hard to do that and keep going, and allow themselves to [be creative]. You can't and it's devastating, and it's infuriating.
'Anxiety shuts down the desire for creativity, but also the ability to be curious, and I think creativity comes from curiosity. And when you're in survival mode, there's no space for curiosity. There's only the next moment, the next day. How will I pay rent? How will I eat?
'I've spent many years [where] I've been on welfare, I've definitely lived off ramen, while trying to avoid medical checks and getting further and further into debt. I've done all of it. And it is possible, but it's very hard to escape into fantasy and escape into curiosity,' she says.
She also noted in her acceptance speech that the conversation The Safekeep became part of 'felt all the more important to me, in the face of violence in
Gaza
and the West Bank and as I've said, the violence my own queer and trans community faces worldwide', she said.
Asked about her relationship with Israel, where her mother is from and where she lived until the age of 10, she says, 'I want to be very careful to not create a nostalgic cloud around my childhood, even though my parents made sure I had a fantastic childhood very heavy in the arts ... I had a very creative and very free childhood.
'But I also know that – you know, speaking of what shuts down creativity – living under occupation, living in war, and that's what many Palestinians experience, have experienced then and still experience now, in even more extreme circumstances.
'And I'm in stark opposition to the [Israeli] government [and] I don't want my nostalgia for my childhood to overshadow that,' she says.
On whether she would set a novel in Israel, she says: 'I think I would set a novel in a diaspora that is connected to there, but I don't think it's possible for me to set a novel entirely there because I left when I was 10, so it would be the perspective of a 10-year-old in one way or another. But perhaps one day, you never know. But for now, we're sticking to the Netherlands for a little while longer.'
She completed a draft of her second novel just before going to London for the Women's Prize festivities. In her research for the book, set in a Dutch fishing village in 1929, she found further evidence of the then-government's use of what she terms 'bureaucracy as violence', as many of the men who lost their jobs in the process of the South Sea being closed off from the North Sea in the early 1930s never received the funding they were promised.
And there is also a titillating premise to the novel likely to pique the interest of fans of The Safekeep: a married woman enlists the help of another woman to seduce her husband and frame him for adultery so she can divorce him.
Asked why she writes in English, she says her parents mainly spoke English to each other when she was a child, although her mother is now an excellent Dutch speaker. 'I was three years old and my parents were still rummaging around the apartment, and I was already at the door with my little dress and my little sunglasses, very impatient to leave the house. And then I shouted at them, 'Let's go, we gotta go!' And suddenly they realised that they were raising a child in English,' she says, laughing at the memory.
Author Paul Murray in Dublin. Photograph: Barry Cronin
Van der Wouden has also spoken previously about her love of
The Bee Sting by Irish author Paul Murray
, and asks, laughing, if I have a spare three hours to discuss its merits. She particularly admires how Murray portrays Imelda, a leading character whose inner life and background are revealed as the book progresses.
'With Imelda, you think, because up until that moment you only see her through the other characters' perspective, and she's quite awful in their POV [point of view]. And then you go to her POV and, honestly, that was ... the most wonderful experience of being proven wrong about a character and falling in love with character, but the language just completely upended my understanding of what we could do with language in character work in novels. And she still is, and I think forever will be, one of my favourite characters in literature.'
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Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
Women's Prize for Fiction winner on The Safekeep, being intersex and her childhood in Israel
It sounds like a hectic afternoon in London when I speak to Yael van der Wouden , author of The Safekeep and winner last Thursday of this year's Women's Prize for Fiction . Speaking on Friday, she says life since hearing she had won the prestigious British literary award and its £30,000 (€35,000) prize has been 'like this, absolutely chaotic', referring to the sirens and beeping noises intruding through the open window. 'It was unreal,' says van der Wouden. 'You prepare yourself for every single scenario and you try to imagine how you would feel with every single scenario, but you can't.' Beyond promoting her work, 'I just get to live my life,' says the Dutch-Israeli author. 'The Netherlands is a very sober country, so no one goes into any kind of heightened emotion over an author existing.' 'It's good because I come here and they give me prizes and then I go home and I'm just a lady in a store,' she says. READ MORE Van der Wouden's debut was up against stiff competition for the prize, including novels by established American writers Elizabeth Strout and Miranda July, along with three other debuts: The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis and Good Girl by Aria Aber. In her acceptance speech, van der Wouden shared that she was intersex. 'I was a girl until I turned 13, and then as I hit puberty all that was supposed to happen did not quite happen, or if it did happen it happened too much,' she said. 'I won't thrill you too much with the specifics but the long and the short of it is that hormonally I am intersex. [ The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden: Beguiling love story told in language that entertains and enthrals Opens in new window ] 'This little fact defined my life throughout my teens until I advocated for the healthcare that I needed. 'In the few precious moments here on stage I am receiving truly the greatest honour of my life as a woman, presenting to you as a woman and accepting this Women's Prize and that is because of every single trans person who's fought for healthcare, who changed the system, the law, societal standards, themselves. I stand on their shoulders.' What prompted her to share this information? 'To me, that's an integral part of my life and the conversations I have with myself, with my friends and family, with my trans loved ones,' she says. So why now? 'Because it just happened to be that the moment where I and a room full of 800 people met for the first time and so they got to hear me speak for the first time. But it's not anything new on my part. It simply was a new moment for all of us together.' Creativity comes from curiosity. And when you're in survival mode, there's no space for curiosity The Safekeep, which also made the Booker Prize shortlist last year, is based on a repressed and melancholic central character, Isabel, whose world is upended when her brother's girlfriend, Ava, stays with her for the summer. A passionate love affair develops between the women, leading to a thrilling plot twist that van der Wouden asks me to be careful not to reveal. It is not exposing too much to say the novel, set in the Netherlands in 1961, concerns itself with the legacy of the second World War. Does she think there might be a through-line between how the Dutch government of the time treated Jewish people during the war and its contemporary policies under its right-wing government? 'The Netherlands has a specific penchant in using bureaucracy as a form of violence, against migrants, immigrants, refugees, poor people, marginalised people. 'This happened in the fallout of the war, this happened with every single migrant crisis that the country has had, and this specifically happened also around what we call the 'toeslagenaffaire'.' This was a scandal in which Dutch tax authorities used an algorithm to spot suspected benefits fraud. It penalised many low-income, ethnic-minority families. 'And that's what I mean with using bureaucracy as a form of violence: using the minutiae of forms and documents and having people fill in that and fill in that ... the small things that you don't think represent violence and end up creating so much suffering for so many people. 'I don't think [the Netherlands] is unique in that, but I can only speak to my country,' she adds. Being an artist in the Netherlands is more difficult than ever, she says, with funding being 'slashed' in education and the arts. She says her parents, both of whom are animators, received a universal income when they moved to the Netherlands, where her father is from, when van der Wouden was 10, after the family had spent the first decade of her life living in her mother's native Israel. She is now in the very privileged position of being an author who can live off her work, she says, but all of her friends working in education and the arts are struggling. 'They are all splitting themselves in so many ways just to make ends meet and it's hard to do that and keep going, and allow themselves to [be creative]. You can't and it's devastating, and it's infuriating. 'Anxiety shuts down the desire for creativity, but also the ability to be curious, and I think creativity comes from curiosity. And when you're in survival mode, there's no space for curiosity. There's only the next moment, the next day. How will I pay rent? How will I eat? 'I've spent many years [where] I've been on welfare, I've definitely lived off ramen, while trying to avoid medical checks and getting further and further into debt. I've done all of it. And it is possible, but it's very hard to escape into fantasy and escape into curiosity,' she says. She also noted in her acceptance speech that the conversation The Safekeep became part of 'felt all the more important to me, in the face of violence in Gaza and the West Bank and as I've said, the violence my own queer and trans community faces worldwide', she said. Asked about her relationship with Israel, where her mother is from and where she lived until the age of 10, she says, 'I want to be very careful to not create a nostalgic cloud around my childhood, even though my parents made sure I had a fantastic childhood very heavy in the arts ... I had a very creative and very free childhood. 'But I also know that – you know, speaking of what shuts down creativity – living under occupation, living in war, and that's what many Palestinians experience, have experienced then and still experience now, in even more extreme circumstances. 'And I'm in stark opposition to the [Israeli] government [and] I don't want my nostalgia for my childhood to overshadow that,' she says. On whether she would set a novel in Israel, she says: 'I think I would set a novel in a diaspora that is connected to there, but I don't think it's possible for me to set a novel entirely there because I left when I was 10, so it would be the perspective of a 10-year-old in one way or another. But perhaps one day, you never know. But for now, we're sticking to the Netherlands for a little while longer.' She completed a draft of her second novel just before going to London for the Women's Prize festivities. In her research for the book, set in a Dutch fishing village in 1929, she found further evidence of the then-government's use of what she terms 'bureaucracy as violence', as many of the men who lost their jobs in the process of the South Sea being closed off from the North Sea in the early 1930s never received the funding they were promised. And there is also a titillating premise to the novel likely to pique the interest of fans of The Safekeep: a married woman enlists the help of another woman to seduce her husband and frame him for adultery so she can divorce him. Asked why she writes in English, she says her parents mainly spoke English to each other when she was a child, although her mother is now an excellent Dutch speaker. 'I was three years old and my parents were still rummaging around the apartment, and I was already at the door with my little dress and my little sunglasses, very impatient to leave the house. And then I shouted at them, 'Let's go, we gotta go!' And suddenly they realised that they were raising a child in English,' she says, laughing at the memory. Author Paul Murray in Dublin. Photograph: Barry Cronin Van der Wouden has also spoken previously about her love of The Bee Sting by Irish author Paul Murray , and asks, laughing, if I have a spare three hours to discuss its merits. She particularly admires how Murray portrays Imelda, a leading character whose inner life and background are revealed as the book progresses. 'With Imelda, you think, because up until that moment you only see her through the other characters' perspective, and she's quite awful in their POV [point of view]. And then you go to her POV and, honestly, that was ... the most wonderful experience of being proven wrong about a character and falling in love with character, but the language just completely upended my understanding of what we could do with language in character work in novels. And she still is, and I think forever will be, one of my favourite characters in literature.'
Irish Times
12 hours ago
- Irish Times
Jurassic World: Rebirth director Gareth Edwards – ‘I think I've got the wrong personality for this job'
Gareth Edwards has always seemed like the least likely fellow to find himself at the helm of multimulti-million-dollar blockbusters. Raised in Nuneaton, the town in the English midlands that gave us George Eliot, he has the modest, self-effacing manner you'd expect from the nicest man in your pub's darts team. Yet here he is. Following a critical hit with the modestly budgeted Monsters, in 2010, he graduated to a remake of Godzilla in 2014, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2016 and, now, the latest film in the Jurassic Park sequence. Is he more aggressive when behind whatever stands in for a megaphone these days? 'No, I think I've got the wrong personality for this job,' he says. 'I feel like I'm very introverted. I'm quiet normally. And that's not great if you're a director on a big set. Weirdly, I think if people visited a set and they had to guess who everyone was, they would probably always guess that the assistant director was the director. They're the ones that shout and get on the megaphone and tell everyone off. If you have a good assistant director, it means you don't really have to do any of that stuff. Thank God.' READ MORE Jurassic World: Rebirth, in which Scarlett Johansson , Mahershala Ali and others fight their way across an island infested with you know what, is the leanest, least pompous entry to the dinosaur cycle since the opening trilogy. There is plenty of sharp, Howard Hawksian dialogue. The characters are cleanly drawn. 'You can go through heaven and hell making a movie,' he says. 'If you get to the end and people don't care about the characters or the storyline it's all for nothing. I got in on day one with a blueprint – ie the script – and I was turning the pages, and I was caring about the characters. I followed the story really clearly.' He must still have had some reservations. In the current troubled age for cinema, a great deal rests on just a few potentially lucrative summer blockbusters. Following the staggering, slightly baffling success of the three preceding Jurassic World films, Rebirth is unquestionably one of those titles. 'You never know what you're getting into, obviously, and you have to trust your gut,' he says. The continuing presence of Steven Spielberg – director of the first two Jurassic Park movies, from the 1990s – as executive producer was apparently a factor. 'Steven's a brilliant film-maker. He understands what is a great film and what isn't. And that is the best thing you can hold on to. David Koepp was the writer on this, who wrote the original. It's really important that you agree on what is a great movie and what isn't. We started chatting and, in our first chats, we didn't really talk about the movie at all. We just started talking about films we loved.' Let's recall how Edwards got here. Raised in Warwickshire, he studied film and video at Surrey Institute of Art & Design and, after graduation, moved into visual effects for television shows. It was not until 2008 that he knocked together an extraordinary feature debut in Monsters. Made for $500,000 – his Star Wars film cost at least 400 times that amount – the poetic creature feature managed with a production crew of just six people. That doesn't feel like enough preparation for a behemoth such as Godzilla. 'I did have a little background in directing for television – and that was probably a better indication of what to expect on a big Hollywood movie,' he says. 'But, no, I honestly felt like, I've got that first film in Hollywood and I just need to survive this – if I survive this I'm going to be okay. But I didn't know if I was going to survive it.' He did survive. That Godzilla was a strange affair. It was launched with a brilliant trailer that leaned into the misty weirdness Edwards mastered in Monsters, but the film itself, though decently reviewed, was criticised for not doing enough with its titular building stomper. It nonetheless managed to turn a decent profit on a huge investment. 'I was expecting to get pummelled by everyone, and then I got offered Star Wars,' he says. 'I was pleasantly surprised, but I still feel like a wannabe film-maker. I still feel like someone who wants to make movies when they grow up. I feel like this is a hobby or a thing I'm doing to pay my bills until I become a proper film-maker. I still don't quite feel like I'm there. You know?' As I said, a commendably modest fellow. Looking back, it could be reasonably argued that Rogue One has aged best of the five Star Wars features released since The Force Awakens in 2015. Like Jurassic World: Rebirth, it is focused on one clean narrative line: Felicity Jones heads a mission aimed at stealing plans for the Death Star. Andor, a sequel series on Disney+, became the best reviewed of the small-screen outings. The ravings of a few sexist nutters noted, Rogue One generated no backlash worth taking seriously. People now love it in a way they don't love The Force Awakens. 'I'm largely relieved that I'm not walking down the street and people are shouting that I ruined their childhood,' Edwards says with a small smile. The fans do do that. 'If you create art and you could be really successful in your day – right there and then, have a big hit in the moment – or be considered really good decades later, which would you pick? I personally would pick the decades-later version. To me it's not about how these films are viewed when they come out. It's about 10 or 20 years later.' Yet some muttering still continues about the production of Rogue One. It was said that Tony Gilroy, who eventually developed Rogue One, was drafted in to oversee extensive reshoots. Edwards is characteristically generous about how that played out. 'We had rewrites come in towards the end, which obviously Tony did, and then we all worked together until the last second, making the film best as it could be,' he says. 'That's kind of how these big movies happen. If I went back in time, and I could text myself some advice, there's nothing I could say. It was predestined to play out that way. It was just the pressure that was on that movie. These movies end up with a lot of different writers on them. The studio just keep pushing and pushing until the last second. The main thing is I'm proud of the film.' Edwards is an interesting fellow to talk to about the predicament in which Hollywood currently finds itself. Fifteen years ago he proved you can make a monster movie on the refuse budget for a Star Wars flick. Two years ago he released an absurdly lavish, thrilling science-fiction epic called The Creator that cost about $80 million. That now counts as cheap for such a thing, but it is rare that films from outside a familiar franchise can attract even that sum. Is it the end for original event movies? 'I really hope not,' he says. 'But I totally understand the problem. I think of something Paul Schrader said recently. Someone asked him, 'Do you think films were better in the 1970s?' And he said, 'No, I think audiences were.'' That grumpy American director and screenwriter still knows how to troll the filmgoing world. 'What he meant was that if you want original artistic films then you've got to go see them. If you want the same thing over and over a million times then go and see that. What everyone's trying to do is to make something they're proud of that was also successful.' Edwards then cautiously dips his toe in this most dangerous of metaphorical pools. 'Tools like AI are a bit like the invention of the electric guitar,' he says. 'Maybe kids in their bedroom can form bands and make amazing music that will change the world. So I'm all in favour of that. But we've got to be careful how we do it.' Not everyone will enjoy hearing this, but few could deny that the current economics of cinema are insane. [ Zoorassic Trail: Giant animatronic dinosaurs come to Dublin Zoo Opens in new window ] 'It feels like we've gone off-piste a little bit and lost our way,' he says. 'I think maybe these new tools are going to be a way to machete our way back on to the right path.' Jurassic World: Rebirth is in cinemas from Wednesday, July 2nd
Irish Times
12 hours ago
- Irish Times
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch: Serviceable, highly readable but a bit preachy
A Family Matter Author : Claire Lynch ISBN-13 : 978-1784745837 Publisher : Chatto & Windus Guideline Price : £16.99 Susan Sontag wrote of Camus (along with the other 'husbandly writers', Baldwin and Orwell) that the issue with his fiction was how apparently his art 'is always in the service of certain intellectual conceptions which are more fully stated in the essays. Camus' fiction is illustrative, philosophical.' This is the issue I can't help but take with A Family Matter, an otherwise perfectly serviceable, highly readable novel. It centres on the author's (very noble) desire to illustrate the hideous treatment of lesbian mothers in the British courts in our extremely recent history. This worthwhile cause ought to be known more widely. And although I certainly might have guessed loosely at the devastating outcomes for homosexual parents seeking custody of their children in our not-so-distant pasts (the flashback sections of the book are set in the 1980s), Lynch's novel expanded my previously vague knowledge. The problem is, I would prefer not to be given my political and moral education in story form. When it comes to novels, I'm looking for art, and ideally entertainment. Instead, novels such as these, with a particular parabolic message, can read a bit, well, preachy. Like the expansion of one of those awful sloganised T-shirts or hats. READ MORE And although politics is dipping its muddy toes in art more and more, I still believe that most people picking up a novel, rather than a nonfiction book or a newspaper, don't especially want to feel they're being hit over the head with some injustice or other. Luckily, Lynch's explanatory essay, outlining the actual facts of the history, has been placed at the back, rather than the front, of the book. The inclusion of such essays dilute the respectability of fiction with an alacrity only matched by a BookTok campaign. You can almost feel the words turning grey and dripping off the page. Having said all this, Lynch writes some exceptionally beautiful sentences, worth underlining. She is acutely insightful when it comes to domestic life, the strange drudgery of a mother's daily living. I wanted much more of this, and hope it's explored in whatever she writes next.
