Who Is Yael van der Wouden? Debut Author Wins Women's Prize For Fiction 2025

Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025 for her debut novel The Safekeep. The book explores a queer love story in the post-Nazi era in the Netherlands. It also traces the expropriation and theft of Jewish property during World War II, revisiting a dark chapter in Dutch history. The Safekeep was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 and won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction.

Who is Yael van der Wouden?

Wouden was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and grew up in the Netherlands. Raised by an Israeli mother and Dutch father, she has described herself as a "Dutch-Israeli mixed-bag-diaspora child." She studied comparative literature at Utrecht University and SUNY Binghamton. Her essay "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank," exploring Dutch-Jewish identity, was published in The Best American Essays in 2018. According to her website, she is also a teacher of creative writing, storytelling, and literature.

While receiving the Women's Prize for Fiction, Wouden revealed that she is intersex. "...hormonally I am intersex," The Guardian quoted her as saying. "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."

Wouden dedicated her award to the queer community and victims of violence worldwide. In the years since she finished writing The Safekeep, “the conversation it’s entered into 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.

Wouden's novel beat the works of established writers Miranda July and Elizabeth Strout. The three other shortlisted books were also first novels: Good Girl by Aria Aber, The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. The prize carries a 30,000-pound prize and is open to female English-language writers from any country.