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Irish Times
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- 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.'
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.'
CBC
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Elizabeth Strout and Miranda July among finalists for $56K Women's Prize for Fiction
American authors Elizabeth Strout and Miranda July are among the finalists for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction, alongside four debut novelists exploring the search for freedom in different countries and cultures. Since 1996, the prize annually celebrates the best novel written in English by a woman. Now in its 30th year, the prize seeks to highlight women writers and create a platform wherein they may be recognized in equal measure to their male peers. Pulitzer Prize winner Strout's Maine-set mystery novel Tell Me Everything and writer-filmmaker July's All Fours, in which a "semi-famous artist" seeks a new life, are shortlisted for the £30,000 prize (approx. $55,744 Cdn) prize. The contenders also include Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden's postwar story The Safekeep and German-born poet Aria Aber's novel Good Girl, about a teenager exploring her dual German-Afghan heritage. Also on the list are Iran-born writer Sanam Mahloudji's intergenerational family saga The Persians and Fundamentally by Britain's Nussaibah Younis, about an academic trying to rehabilitate women caught up with the Islamic State group. Is Miranda July's novel All Fours changing the conversation around sex and desire in women over 40? Author Kit de Waal, who is chairing the panel of judges, said that the six books were "classics of the future" that explored "the importance of human connection." "What is surprising and refreshing is to see so much humour, nuance and lightness employed by these novelists to shed light on challenging concepts," she said. On the jury, de Waal is joined by novelist Diana Evans, author Bryony Gordon, magazine editor Deborah Joseph and musician Amelia Warner. The winner will be announced on June 12. In addition to the prize money, this winner will also receive the "Bessie," a bronze statue made by the late British sculptor, Grizel Niven. Last year's winner was V.V. Ganeshananthan for her novel Brotherless Night.
Asharq Al-Awsat
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Elizabeth Strout, Miranda July are Among Finalists for the Women's Prize for Fiction
American authors Elizabeth Strout and Miranda July are among finalists announced Wednesday for the Women's Prize for Fiction, alongside four debut novelists exploring the search for freedom in different countries and cultures. Pulitzer Prize winner Strout's Maine-set mystery novel 'Tell Me Everything' and writer'-filmmaker July's 'All Fours,' in which a 'semi-famous artist' seeks a new life, are shortlisted for the 30,000 pound ($39,000) prize. It's open to female English-language writers from any country. The contenders also include Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden's postwar story 'The Safekeep' and German-born poet Aria Aber's novel 'Good Girl,' about a teenager exploring her dual German-Afghan heritage. Also on the list are Iran-born writer Sanam Mahloudji's intergenerational family saga 'The Persians,' and 'Fundamentally' by Britain's Nussaibah Younis, about an academic trying to rehabilitate women caught up with ISIS, The AP news reported. Author Kit de Waal, who is chairing the panel of judges, said that the six books were 'classics of the future' that explored 'the importance of human connection.' 'What is surprising and refreshing is to see so much humor, nuance and lightness employed by these novelists to shed light on challenging concepts,' she said. Previous winners of the fiction prize, founded in 1996, include Zadie Smith, Tayari Jones and Barbara Kingsolver. Last year, award organizers launched a companion Women's Prize for Nonfiction to help rectify an imbalance in publishing. In 2022, only 26.5% of nonfiction books reviewed in Britain's newspapers were by women, and male writers dominated established nonfiction writing prizes. Winners of both nonfiction and fiction prizes will be announced on June 12 at a ceremony in London.
The Independent
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Elizabeth Strout and Miranda July are among finalists for the Women's Prize for Fiction
American authors Elizabeth Strout Miranda July are among finalists announced Wednesday for the Women's Prize for Fiction, alongside four debut novelists exploring the search for freedom in different countries and cultures. Pulitzer Prize winner Strout's Maine-set mystery novel 'Tell me Everything' and writer'-filmmaker July's 'All Fours,' in which a 'semi-famous artist' seeks a new life, are shortlisted for the 30,000 pound ($39,000) prize. It's open to female English-language writers from any country. The contenders also include Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden's postwar story 'The Safekeep' and German-born poet Aria Aber's novel 'Good Girl,' about a teenager exploring her dual German- Afghan heritage. Also on the list are Iran-born writer Sanam Mahloudji's intergenerational family saga 'The Persians,' and 'Fundamentally' by Nussaibah Younis, about an academic trying to rehabilitate women caught up with the Islamic State group. Author Kit de Waal, who is chairing the panel of judges, said that the six books were 'classics of the future' that explored 'the importance of human connection.' 'What is surprising and refreshing is to see so much humor, nuance and lightness employed by these novelists to shed light on challenging concepts,' she said. Previous winners of the fiction prize, founded in 1996, include Zadie Smith, Tayari Jones and Barbara Kingsolver. Last year, award organizers launched a companion Women's Prize for Nonfiction to help rectify an imbalance in publishing. In 2022, only 26.5% of nonfiction books reviewed in Britain's newspapers were by women, and male writers dominated established nonfiction writing prizes. Winners of both nonfiction and fiction prizes will be announced on June 12 at a ceremony in London.
