Latest news with #TheStoryofaHeart
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.
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.'
Daily Mirror
13-06-2025
- Health
- Daily Mirror
Author inspired by 'most amazing story' on Mirror front page wins top award
Dr Rachel Clarke wrote 'The Story of a Heart' after our story about Max Johnson and Keira Ball showed 'humanity at its finest' - she has now been awarded a top literary prize The best seller inspired by our 'Change the Law for Life' campaign has won a top literary prize after showing 'humanity at its finest'. Dr Rachel Clarke wrote 'The Story of a Heart' after reading The Mirror 's front page about Max Johnson and Keira Ball. Max, now 17, of Winsford, Cheshire, and his heart donor Keira Ball, who died aged nine, had the new organ donor law in England named after them. Five years after its introduction in May, 2020, it is credited with helping to save and transform hundreds of lives every year. Dr Clarke won the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction after her book "left a deep and long-lasting impression" on the judging panel. Today she recalled how she was inspired by our front page story which told how the siblings of Keira listened to their sister's heart beating in the chest of Max after his transplant in 2017. She said: "It was the most amazing story I had read in my life and I thought: 'I would love to tell it in a book." It has won plaudits and critical acclaim around the world. Dr Clarke recalled: "It was on the front page of the Mirror as they changed the law on organ donation. Keira's mum read the story and she sent a message to Max's mum. It simply read: 'I think your son has my daughter's heart and it is the most beautiful heart in the world'. "That started a chain of events which culminated in Keira's family meeting Max and with a stethoscope listening to her heart beating in his chest. And when I read that story I thought 'that is the most amazing story I have ever read in my life." She urged people to think about their organ donor wishes, adding: "The statistics are stark. We have 8,000 people in Britain waiting for an organ, 250 children in peril. It is through Max's story that you can make vivid the desperate need for organs. The fact that if only we talked about our organ donor decisions, we could save the lives of children. "Keira was an incredibly caring little girl. Her dad Joe said she gave her last sweets to her sisters, she loved animals and if she saw a snail in the road she moved it so no one stood on it. "Incredibly, she was in intensive care when her little sister Katelyn, then 11, turned to her doctor and said: 'Can we donate Keira's organs? I know it is what she would have wanted'. I interviewed the doctor who said that had never happened before. "Her dad Joe said yes. It was something that Keira would have loved, to save four lives. There is endless bad news about the NHS struggling with waiting lists. But behind each successful heart transplant there is an army of surgeons, doctors, nurses and specialists. "I found the absolute best of human nature, they would work through the night, they tucked a teddy under Keira's arm. This was not just exemplary medical care, it was humanity at its finest." Dr Clarke will receive £30,000 in prize money. Kavita Puri, chair of judges, said: "Humanity just shines out. It is a really remarkable book and will be read for years to come." Max was nine when he received the heart of Keira, who tragically lost her life in a car accident near her home in Barnstaple, Devon. Despite his tender years, he asked that she be included in the name for the new legislation, and it was named Max and Keira's Law. Opt out means people no longer have to carry an organ donor card. All adults in England are considered as having agreed to donate their own organs when they die unless they opt out. Last year, deemed consent was applied in 1109 cases. Max 'never forgets' his debt to Keira and is still in touch with her parents Joe and Loanna, and her siblings Bradley, 15, Katelyn, 19, and 20-year-old Keely. Loanna, 40, said that her daughter's name 'will live on forever' in the new law. She added: "So much good has come from that devastating loss for us, she has benefited so many people by donating her organs. "When I hear of Max and Keira's Law, I know that it took the two of them to make that happen." Max's dad Paul, 51, a civil servant, added: "Max has grown into a young man, with a weekend job, GCSEs to sit and a driving licence. Our thoughts never stray far from Keira and the Ball family, because none of this would have happened without them."
Tatler Asia
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Tatler Asia
Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2025: 6 timely books shaping how women document our complex world
'The Story of a Heart' by Rachel Clarke Above 'The Story of a Heart' by Rachel Clarke (Photo: Abacus) Palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke brings her signature depth and restraint to the story of a child's heart transplant, an event that might, in another writer's hands, invite melodrama. Instead, Clarke writes with a clinician's precision and a humanist's empathy, charting the emotional undercurrents of grief, hope and moral complexity that surround organ donation. It's not about the transplant as a 'miracle' but as an existential moment shared by multiple families, connected by something more than just biology. 'Raising Hare' by Chloe Dalton Above 'Raising Hare' by Chloe Dalton (Photo: Canongate Books) What begins as an act of compassion rescuing an injured hare during the early days of lockdown becomes an unexpectedly haunting meditation on care, autonomy and the porous boundary between wildness and domestic life. Chloe Dalton resists the twee instincts of nature writing, instead offering a narrative that leans into the uncanny. The hare, which keeps returning unbidden, becomes a symbol not just of resilience but of something older and harder to name: instinct, memory and the nonverbal contracts between species. 'Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Courageous WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka' by Clare Mulley Above 'Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Courageous WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka' by Clare Mulley (Photo: W&N) Clare Mulley resurrects the story of Elżbieta Zawacka or 'Agent Zo', the only woman to serve as a courier for the Polish resistance and later the British Special Operations Executive. This isn't a Cold War caricature of female espionage. Instead, Mulley paints a nuanced, multidimensional portrait of a woman navigating the brutal moral calculus of war. Without softening Zawacka's contradictions or overplaying heroism, Agent Zo becomes both a gripping biography and a serious exploration of patriotism, gender and survival under totalitarianism. 'What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World's Oceans' by Helen Scales Above 'What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World's Oceans' by Helen Scales (Photo: Grove Press UK) Marine biologist Helen Scales writes with the curiosity of a scientist and the sensibility of a poet in this quietly urgent account of our oceans. She doesn't sugarcoat the damage of coral bleaching, acidification and extinction, but neither does she descend into apocalyptic hopelessness. Instead, Scales chooses to write about resilience: ecosystems that adapt, communities that fight for preservation and the complex, often contradictory emotions that come with loving a world in decline. It's a book about awe as much as warning. 'Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China' by Yuan Yang Above 'Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China' by Yuan Yang (Photo: Bloomsbury Publishing) Economist and former journalist Yuan Yang follows the lives of four women in modern China as they navigate the competing pressures of ambition, family, state control and personal freedom. Structurally daring and emotionally layered, Private Revolutions avoids the trap of Western simplification. Instead, it captures the fractal nature of change: personal, political, generational and how it manifests inside kitchens, courtrooms, office towers and dissident networks. Yang's reporting is sharp, empathetic and rigorously unsentimental. What makes the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist interesting isn't its diversity, it's the editorial rigour. These aren't neat stories with clean morals. They are dense, sometimes uncomfortable and always engaging. And in an industry that still favours polished narratives told by the usual suspects, it matters that these books were chosen. The 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction doesn't offer easy consensus. Not every book will appeal to every reader, but taken together, they offer a snapshot of the questions serious non-fiction is grappling with now. That's reason enough to pay attention.
Washington Post
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Musician Neneh Cherry and medic Rachel Clarke are among finalists for a major nonfiction prize
LONDON — A moving memoir by Swedish singer Neneh Cherry and the gripping story of a heart transplant by British doctor Rachel Clarke are among finalists for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction , set up to help fix the gender imbalance in nonfiction publishing. Cherry's 'A Thousand Threads' and Clarke's 'The Story of a Heart' are on a six-book shortlist for the 30,000 pound ($39,000) prize.
