Women's Prize for Fiction ‘greatest honour' as an intersex woman, says winner
'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.
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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- 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
3 hours ago
- 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
4 hours ago
- 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."
