Nonfiction award goes to Rachel Clarke’s ‘beautiful and compassionate’ The Story of a Heart, about a lifesaving transplant seen from all sides
Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden has won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, while British doctor Rachel Clarke took home the nonfiction award.
Van der Wouden’s The Safekeep and Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, which made last year’s Booker and Baillie Gifford prize shortlists respectively, were announced as the winners on Thursday evening, with each author awarded £30,000.
The Safekeep is a romantic and family saga set in the Netherlands in 1961 which explores the treatment of Dutch Jews in the postwar period. “This is an impressive debut,” wrote Rachel Seiffert in a Guardian review of the novel. “I already look forward to Van der Wouden’s next. She can draw characters with nuance, without fear too; she creates and sustains atmospheres deftly, and ultimately delivers a thrilling story.”
Chair of the fiction prize’s judging panel, author Kit de Waal, said: “The Safekeep is that rare thing: a masterful blend of history, suspense and historical authenticity … a classic in the making.”
