Debut novel by Dutch author wins 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction
The novel follows Isabel, a young woman whose life in solitude is upended when her brother's girlfriend, Eva, comes to live with her in their family house in what turns into a summer of obsession, suspicion and desire.
Writer and chair of judges for the fiction prize, Kit de Waal, said: 'The Safekeep is that rare thing: a masterful blend of history, suspense and historical authenticity.
'Every word is perfectly placed, page after page revealing an aspect of war and the Holocaust that has been, until now, mostly unexplored in fiction.
'It is also a love story with beautifully rendered intimate scenes written with delicacy and compelling eroticism.
'This astonishing debut is a classic in the making, a story to be loved and appreciated for generations to come. Books like this don't come along every day.'
Van der Wouden will receive £30,000 along with a limited-edition bronze statuette known as the Bessie which was created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.
The judging panel for the Women's Prize for Fiction included novelist and journalist Diana Evans, author, journalist and mental-health campaigner Bryony Gordon, writer and magazine editor Deborah Joseph, and musician and composer Amelia Warner.
Also announced at the ceremony was the recipient of the non-fiction award which was won by physician Dr Rachel Clarke for The Story Of A Heart, a book that explores the human experience behind organ donation.
The book recounts two family stories, documenting how medical staff take care of nine-year-old Kiera in her final hours following a car accident while offering a new life to also nine-year-old Max who is suffering from heart failure from a viral infection.
Journalist, broadcaster and author Kavita Puri who was the chair of judges for the non-fiction prize, said: 'The Story Of A Heart left a deep and long-lasting impression on us. Clarke's writing is authoritative, beautiful and compassionate.
'The research is meticulous, and the storytelling is expertly crafted. She holds this precious story with great care and tells it with dignity, interweaving the history of transplant surgery seamlessly.
'This is a book where humanity shines through on every page, from the selfless act of the parents who gift their daughter's heart in the depths of despair, to the dedication of the NHS workers. It is unforgettable, and will be read for many years to come.'
Clarke, who is behind Breathtaking, Dear Life and Your Life In My Hands will receive £30,000 along with a limited-edition piece of art known as the Charlotte which was gifted by the Charlotte Aitken Trust.
The judging panel for the non-fiction prize included writer and broadcaster Dr Leah Broad, whose work focuses on women's cultural history along with novelist and critic Elizabeth Buchan.
The writer and environmental academic, Dr Elizabeth-Jane Burnett was also a judge for the non-fiction award along with the author and writer of The Hyphen newsletter on Substack, Emma Gannon.
Previous winners of the fiction prize include Tayari Jones with An American Marriage and The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller, while the first winner of the non-fiction prize was awarded last year to Naomi Klein for Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World.
The awards were announced by the Women's Prize Trust, a UK charity that aims to 'create equitable opportunities for women in the world of books and beyond'.
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Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. 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She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
