Latest news with #TheSafekeep
Indian Express
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
If you loved The Safekeep, you will devour these 3 books
Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep is having a moment. The Dutch author's debut novel first captured global attention in 2024 when it made the Booker Prize shortlist. Now, fresh off its Women's Prize for Fiction win, it is once again in the limelight: bookstagram cannot stop swooning over it, and book clubs have added the haunting tale of repression, desire, and unraveling secrets in post-war Netherlands to their reading roster. If you were captivated by The Safekeep, you are likely craving more books that plumb the depth of complicated familial relationships, queer desires and the heavy baggage of history. Here are three reads that share similar themes of intimacy, identity, and the weight of the past. For readers who appreciated The Safekeep's exploration of personal and historical legacies, Martyr! offers a poetic dive into identity, addiction, and the search for meaning. Cyrus Shams, a recovering alcoholic and Iranian-American poet, grapples with grief, art, and the ghosts of his past. Akbar's prose is lush and philosophical, weaving together themes of queerness, what it means to be an immigrant , and self-destruction with raw honesty. Like The Safekeep, this novel balances intimacy with existential weight, making it a perfect follow-up. A timeless classic that, much like The Safekeep, explores forbidden desire and the suffocating grip of societal expectations. Set in 1950s Paris, Baldwin's novel follows David, an American man torn between his engagement to a woman and his passionate affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender. The tension between private longing and public performance is palpable as one grapples with the themes of secrecy, shame, and self-denial. Treated with mythic grandeur, the The Song of Achilles has become a modern classic of LGBTQ+ literature. Miller, who studied classics, reimagines Homer's Iliad through the lens of Patroclus, an exiled prince who becomes Achilles' closest companion. The story traces their relationship from childhood friendship to passionate love. In the battle of Gods and demigods, the novel shows how the most profound wars are waged not with swords, but with hearts. The 3,000-year-old love story that reads as freshly urgent as any contemporary romance as the inevitable tragedy gains new power when seen through Patroclus' devoted eyes.
Indian Express
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Yael van der Wouden wins 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction
Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden has won the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction with The Safekeep, while physician Rachel Clarke claimed the Nonfiction Prize for The Story of a Heart. Both receive £30,000 (approximately Rs 35 lakh )and the 'Bessie' statuette. Van der Wouden's winning novel, set in postwar Netherlands, explores Jewish identity through a haunting family saga. The intersex author dedicated her win to trans activists, sharing how her own healthcare struggles informed her writing. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden is the 30th winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction. This unsettling, tightly-plotted debut novel explores repressed desire and historical amnesia against the backdrop of the Netherlands post-WWII. The Safekeep is at once a highly-charged, claustrophobic drama played out between two deeply flawed characters, and a bold, insightful exploration of the emotional aftermath of trauma and complicity. Clarke's winning work offers a profound exploration of organ transplantation, blending medical history with deeply personal narratives. Good Girl – Aria Aber All Fours – Miranda July The Persians – Sanam Mahloudji Tell Me Everything – Elizabeth Strout The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden Fundamentally – Nussaibah Younis A Thousand Threads – Neneh Cherry The Story of a Heart – Rachel Clarke Raising Hare – Chloe Dalton Agent Zo – Clare Mulley What the Wild Sea Can Be – Helen Scales Private Revolutions – Yuan Yang The judging panel, chaired by author Kit de Waal, praised The Safekeep as 'a masterful blend of history and suspense.' Established in 1996 to address gender inequality in publishing, the Women's Prize continues to champion exceptional writing by women.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A life-affirming memoir and a beautiful story of female desire are the must-read winners of this year's Women's Prize
Tears flowed among the members of the audience listening to Rachel Clarke's acceptance speech as she won the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction at the awards ceremony in London's Bloomsbury. The NHS doctor, author The Story Of A Heart, spoke movingly about the two children who inspired her memoir: nine-year-old Keira Ball, who suffered catastrophic brain injuries and died after a car accident and Max Johnson, who received her heart through a donor transplant. Kavita Puri, chair of judges for the non-fiction prize, said it had 'left a deep and long-lasting impression' on the panel. 'Clarke's writing is authoritative, beautiful and compassionate. The research is meticulous, and the storytelling is expertly crafted,' she said. 'She holds this precious story with great care and tells it with dignity, interweaving the history of transplant surgery seamlessly.' Shortlisted alongside for The Story Of A Heart in the non-fiction category were A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, Agent Zo: The Untold Story Of Courageous WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley, What The Wild Sea Can Be: The Future Of The World's Ocean by Helen Scales and Private Revolutions: Coming Of Age In A New China by Yuan Yang. The winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction was Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden, who won with her debut, The Safekeep. Set in 1960s Netherlands, it's the story of two women thrown together in a remote house in the aftermath of World War II and their developing relationship. Kit de Waal, Chair of Judges for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction, 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's debut beat novels by the more established writers Miranda July (All Fours) and Elizabeth Strout (Tell Me Everything). The three other shortlisted books were also first novels: Good Girl by Aria Aber, The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. Both winning authors will receive a £30,000 prize each in recognition of their achievements. You Might Also Like The anti-ageing wonder ingredient you're missing in your skincare routine 15 dresses perfect for a summer wedding 6 items our fashion team always take on a beach holiday
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.'
New Indian Express
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Yael van der Wouden and Rachel Clarke win Women's Prize book awards
LONDON: Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden won the Women's Prize for Fiction on Thursday for her debut novel 'The Safekeep,' a story of repressed emotion and suppressed historical memory in the Netherlands after World War II. British physician Rachel Clarke won the Women's Prize for Nonfiction for exploring the human drama behind organ donation in 'The Story of a Heart.' Both prizes carry a 30,000 pound ($41,000) purse and are open to female English-language writers from any country. Last year Van der Wouden became the first Dutch writer to be a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize for 'The Safekeep.' Set in the early 1960s, the novel centers on a Dutch family, their house, and the secrets they both hold. Author Kit de Waal, who chaired the fiction judging panel, called it a 'beautiful, shocking and sensuous' book that reveals 'an aspect of war and the Holocaust that has been, until now, mostly unexplored in fiction.' Van der Wouden told The Associated Press that the book is about 'how we narrate history ... What is actively written out and what is written into it, and, indeed, what we actively choose to forget.' Van der Wouden said in her acceptance speech that 'hormonally, I am intersex,' and that fact 'defined my life throughout my teens until I advocated for the healthcare that I needed.' She said the fact she was 'receiving truly the greatest honor of my life as a woman ... 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.' Previous winners of the fiction prize, founded in 1996, include Zadie Smith, Tayari Jones and Barbara Kingsolver. Last year, award organizers launched a companion nonfiction award 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. Clarke works as a palliative care doctor, and 'The Story of a Heart' traces a transplant through the true stories of two children: one killed in a car crash, and one who could be saved by a new heart. Journalist Kavita Puri, who led the judges, said 'Clarke's writing is authoritative, beautiful and compassionate. The research is meticulous, and the storytelling is expertly crafted.'
