A Parting Gift: Women's Prize Winner on How Deaths Kindled Debut Novel

It has been a dramatic couple of years for the 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, attracted frenzied bidding and was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Now it has won the Women's Prize for Fiction.

- Lisa Allardice

"I wrote this book from a place of hopelessness," said Van der Wouden, 37. "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 expected. "I have tall energy," she jokes. 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 on Thursday, 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," she said. "And then it was irrelevant, because I got the healthcare that I needed, and I didn't even have to mention it to people."

The acceptance speech was the first time she has spoken about it publicly: not to have done so, "wouldn't have been me," she said. "I had my five minutes on stage and I figured what better moment to share something that I care about."

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.