The winner of this year’s fiction prize on growing up as an outsider, why we’re all guilty of complicity, and using her acceptance speech to reveal that she is intersex
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t 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.
