Latest news with #Women'sPrize
Irish Times
21-06-2025
- 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.'
The Independent
13-06-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Women's Prize winner slams ‘unbelievable' NHS doctor unemployment
Rachel Clarke, author and palliative care doctor, won the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for her fourth book, 'The Story of a Heart.' Clarke has urged Health Secretary Wes Streeting to address the potential unemployment of resident doctors due to a shortage of training posts, with approximately 20,000 doctors expected to miss out on specialty training this summer. Clarke highlighted the absurdity of doctors being unemployed or seeking alternative work like Uber shifts when the NHS desperately needs them. Clarke referenced a Medical Defence Union (MDU) survey revealing that over a third of working NHS doctors feel their ability to treat patients is impaired due to exhaustion from staff shortages and long hours. Dutch author Yael van der Wouden won the Women's Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, 'The Safekeep,' which explores themes of displacement and generational trauma.
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."
Daily Mirror
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
