Palestinian author Yasmin Zaher wins Dylan Thomas Prize

The prize is the world's largest and most prestigious literary award for young writers.
The Coin, which was released in paperback on May 1, 2025, was chosen unanimously by the judging panel.
It draws on Zaher's personal experiences to explore themes of identity and heritage.
Namita Gokhale, chair of judges, said: "The judging panel was unanimous in their decision to name debut novelist Yasmin Zaher as the winner of the 2025 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize.
"Zaher brings complexity and intensity to the page through her elegantly concise writing: The Coin is a borderless novel, tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour.
"It fizzes with electric energy."
Zaher was awarded the £20,000 prize at a ceremony in Swansea on May 15.
The prize celebrates exceptional literary talent aged 39 or under.
The other shortlisted titles for the 2025 prize were Rapture's Road by Seán Hewitt, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson, and Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams.
The 2025 prize was judged by Namita Gokhale, Professor Daniel Williams, Jan Carson, Mary Jean Chan, and Max Liu.
Yasmin Zaher joins a list of previous winners including Caleb Azumah Nelson, Arinze Ifeakandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Maggie Shipstead, Guy Gunaratne, and Kayo Chingonyi.

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Wales Online

14-06-2025

• Wales Online

Zookeeper who cares for 42 penguins to represent Wales at international Miss Earth pageant

Zookeeper who cares for 42 penguins to represent Wales at international Miss Earth pageant 'It's very much stinking of fish one day, but by the evening, I'm all glammed up!' Abigail Wood pictured in her role as zookeeper at Folly Farm (Image: Folly Farm Adventure Park & Zoo ) By day, Abigail Wood has the dream job of looking after more than 40 penguins at one of Wales's best-loved family attractions. Feeding "stinking" fish to the vulnerable flightless birds three times a day, the unglamorous nature of the job is second nature to the Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo zookeeper. ‌ By night, however, things are completely different for the 25-year-old. Abigail has just been crowned Miss Earth Wales 2025, a beauty pageant entertainment contest recently held at the Memo Arts Centre in Barry. ‌ But whilst to most these would seem polar opposite ventures, for Miss Wood, originally from Swansea, now living in Pembrokeshire, the contest's integral promotion of environmental awareness very much aligns with her own values which she has cultivated since she was a young girl, after going on three-week trips with her family to areas with no phone signal, embracing nature. Never miss a Swansea story by signing up to our newsletter here Abigail holds a master of science degree in environmental biology: conservation and resource management from Swansea University, having studied there for six years. Earlier this year, she joined Folly Farm as a seasonal penguin keeper, helping to care for their array of vulnerable humboldt and macaroni species of penguins at their penguin coast exhibit. Article continues below She is also the founder of the 'wild about nature' initiative, a program dedicated to connecting children with nature and encouraging them to become passionate conservationists and future eco-leaders, including publishing a children's nature activity book. Abigail Wood pictured with one of the penguins at Folly Farm which she looks after (Image: Folly Farm Adventure Park & Zoo ) "It's very much stinking of fish one day, but by the evening, I'm all glammed up!" she said. ‌ "It all started for me when I was young. My grandparents have a caravan near Fishguard way, and we'd go there every summer for about three weeks of the year, and they would take us to different nature reserves and anywhere we'd be outdoors. "There was no iPads or phones - there was no signal there, so that was our only thing, to go outside, whether it be flying a kite, or me and my brother raiding our grandfather's lock-up and getting out some fishing nets, before going and catching butterflies. We'd have little ID books, and we'd find out what butterflies we'd caught. "I just absolutely loved doing that, and it was something I got to do at university, with different bird and butterfly and otter surveys. ‌ "I have been involved in pageantry for about three years now. It was a spur of the moment, enter and see what happens thing. I saw there was the Miss Earth pageant, and I went to watch it one year and said to myself, 'this is what I want to get involved in, this is me'. When you're in pageants, you have what is called an advocacy form, and for me it was conservation education. "Being in university, I was always developing my knowledge about conservation and what we can do to make a change, and then I got my zookeeping job, so my day-to-day life is conservation and educating others. "It all fell into place and I also wrote a children's activity book. There's plans for me to host some workshops in Folly Farm over the summer, and it's just about getting the word out that conservation and being outdoors is fun and can make a difference. ‌ "I absolutely love working at Folly Farm and they have been so supportive throughout this entire thing. They were so excited to find out more about it. When I found out I'd be working with penguins, that was such an amazing thing. I absolutely love it. "There's 42 penguins, humboldt and macaroni species. They get fed three times a day, which takes an hour to two hours, so a lot of my day is just feeding penguins. I do also look after flamingo and lots of different duck species. There's very minimal cleaning but a lot of feeding." Abigail has been crowned Miss Earth Wales 2025 (Image: Andrew Mee Photography ) ‌ Abigail is crowned at the ceremony (Image: Andrew Mee Photography ) Her win at Miss Earth Wales means she is the Welsh entry to the Miss Earth pageant, an international environment event taking place later this year, in October or November, channelling the beauty pageant industry as an effective tool to promote environmental awareness. She said: "When I was speaking to some of my coaches, we were discussing glamorising nature, and showing that you can be a queen and eco-friendly at the same time, and that's one message I'd like to get across in Miss Earth - yes I can be glammed up for a pageant one night, but also during my day to day job, be surrounded by penguins, and poo, and fish! Article continues below "There's a lot of prep to do before then and making sure everything is ready to go, as it'll be around four or five weeks out there doing lots of different activities, from tree planting, visiting rescues, sanctuaries and visiting universities and doing public speaking, before the actual competition. There's a lot going on, a lot of team building and learning about what they do and what they are passionate about." Get news updates on your phone by joining our WhatsApp community here . We occasionally treat members to special offers, promotions and ads from us and our partners. See our Privacy Notice.

The Guardian

13-06-2025

• The Guardian

Women's prize winner Yael van der Wouden: ‘It's heartbreaking to see so much hatred towards queer people'

It has been a dramatic couple of years for 37-year-old Dutch author Yael van der Wouden: her first novel, The Safekeep, a love story that deals with the legacy of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, was the focus of a frenzied bidding war and shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. Last night it won the Women's prize for fiction. 'I wrote this book from a place of hopelessness,' she says when we meet. 'I was looking for a ray of sunshine.' This morning in London the sun is blazing. She could never have expected that her novel would see off shortlisted authors including Miranda July (of whose work she is a big fan) and Elizabeth Strout. Warm and open, the author is shorter than I expected. Coming as she does from a country of tall people, as she jokes: 'I have tall energy.' She has great energy, despite several glasses of champagne last night and only a few hours' sleep. On her shoulder is a tattoo of a hare – an important symbol in the novel – which she had done after completing the book. In her tearful acceptance speech, Van der Wouden told the audience that when she hit puberty: 'all at once, my girlhood became an uncertain fact.' The fact that she is hormonally intersex 'was a huge part of my 20s, and then I got the healthcare that I needed … 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.' It was the first time she has spoken about it publicly. Not to have done so she tells me, 'wouldn't have been me. I had my five minutes on stage and I figured what better moment to share something that I care about? It's heartbreaking to see so much hatred toward trans identities, queer identities.' Set in the Netherlands in 1961, The Safekeep is a tense psychological thriller and tender love story between two very different women, Isabel and Eva. It is a story of dispossession and self-discovery, national and intimate secrets and shame. 'This is a novel about a woman who is obsessed with a house, and then a stranger comes and upends her life,' the author says. Isabel is gentile, Eva is Jewish. To say much more would be to give away clues in a narrative that unfolds in a series of jagged revelations, like the shards of broken china Isabel cherishes, that come together to make a devastating and beautiful whole. The idea for the novel came to her 'as a parting gift' in a car on the way to one of the funerals of her Dutch grandparents, who died within days of each other in 2021. 'It came from a place of trying to escape grief,' she says. 'I was trying to find distraction in my own head, as I've done since I was a kid.' Born in Israel in 1987 to a Jewish mother of Romanian and Bulgarian heritage and a Dutch father, Van der Wouden, who describes herself as a 'Dutch-Israeli mixed-bag-diaspora child', spent her first 10 years in Ramat Gan, a city just east of Tel Aviv. She is careful not to talk about her childhood through what she calls 'a pink cloud' of nostalgia because of her vehement opposition to the Israel-Gaza war – she would like to see 'a ceasefire with immediate aid'. Both her parents were animators (her father created an Israeli version of Sesame Street) and while she and her two younger sisters were encouraged to engage with all art forms, she was not at all bookish. It wasn't until the family moved to the Netherlands when she was 10 that Van der Wouden discovered books – with Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden being a particular favourite. But she also discovered antisemitism, while living with her grandparents in a house in the forest. Though that home is still her 'happy place', going from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv to 'being the only Jew in the village' wasn't easy. To her new Dutch classmates she resembled Anne Frank. Now, she has no time for the rhetoric of tolerance. 'I think that's a terrible word, because tolerance is putting up with somebody. I want to be desired. I want to be loved. Rather than writing a story about tolerance, I wanted to write a story about love in the aftermath of war.' With Isabel, she created a character who goes from prejudice and repulsion to desire. There is a lot (an entire chapter) of sex in the novel. She laughs. 'My goal was to imbue the whole book with a sense of tension, and that tension is erotic.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion She deliberately chose the perspective of Isabel rather than Eva, so as not just to tell the victim's story. 'There's also many parts of perpetrator within me, within my history,' she says. Van der Wouden had never read a novel that explored what she calls 'the psyche of quiet complicity'. Through Isabel she wanted to show that 'complicity comes from small and uninteresting acts of dismissal', and it is something of which we are all guilty. 'It's part of the human experience. The question is, how do we deal with knowing that we looked away from something terrible, how do we then move forward?' The emotional power of the novel rests on the way in which Isabel reveals herself to be someone completely different, even to herself. 'What's like me,' Isabel says to her brother. 'There's no such thing. Like me.' This speaks to Van der Wouden's personal experience. 'We don't leave this life in the same bodies were born into, we are always under flux,' she says. 'This is not to say that gender and sexuality is a choice followed by change, but rather that change is an inherent part of life.' On the question of the supreme court ruling on gender rights, she adds: 'To subject that to law feels baffling to me, especially as it is accompanied by legal, verbal and physical violence.' Much of The Safekeep was written during lockdown in Utrecht, where she had an attic apartment overlooking the canal. 'A beautiful golden cage,' she says. She now lives half an hour away in Rotterdam, where she is thrilled to have a garden. She has already completed the first draft of a second novel set in a fishing village in the Netherlands in 1929. Her greatest hope for the novel as it goes on to find a bigger audience, 'if this isn't too saccharine,' she says apologetically, 'is, in fact, hope.'

Daily Mirror

13-06-2025

• Daily Mirror

Women's Prize for Fiction is 'greatest honour' as an intersex woman, says winner

The Women's Prize for Fiction 2025 went to Dutch author Yael van der Wouden for her debut novel, The Safekeep. The win, she says, is her "greatest honour" as an intersex woman Yael van der Wouden is the newly-crowned winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction and has called her triumph "the greatest honour of my life as a woman". Van der Wouden's win marks the 30th anniversary of the historic award which is organised by the Women's Prize Trust. As a registered charity, the Women's Prize Trust is dedicated to improving "access to and appreciation of women's writing" and uses their awards platform to champion brilliant women writers and role models. ‌ The Prize is awarded each year to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000, anonymously endowed, and the 'Bessie', a bronze statuette created by the artist Grizel Niven. ‌ Dutch author Yael van der Wouden won the prestigious prize this year for her debut novel, The Safekeep, which was also shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2024. Described by the head of the judging panel as an "astonishing debut", her novel delves into themes of suppressed longing and the lasting effects of the Holocaust within the context of post-Second World War Netherlands. During the Women's Prize award ceremony, Van der Wouden took time in her victory speech to advocate for the trans community and detail her personal journey, saying: "I was a girl until I turned 13, and then, as I hit puberty, all that was supposed to happen did not quite happen. I won't thrill you too much with the specifics, but the long and the short of it is that, hormonally, I'm intersex. "This little fact defined my life throughout my teens, until I advocated for the health care that I needed. The surgery and the hormones that I needed, which not all intersex people need. Not all intersex people feel at odds with their gender presentation," she added. Help us improve our content by completing the survey below. We'd love to hear from you! Article continues below She noted: "I mention the fact that I did, because 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 health care, who changed the system, the law, societal standards, themselves. I stand on their shoulders." The NHS website says intersex, or differences in sex development (DSD), is a group of rare conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs that mean a person's sex development is different to most. Past Women's Prize Fiction winners include V. V. Ganeshananthan for Brotherless Night, Maggie O'Farrell for Hamnet and Tayari Jones for An American Marriage.