It sounds like a hectic afternoon in London when I speak to Yael van der Wouden, author of The Safekeep and winner last Thursday of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Speaking on Friday, she says life since hearing she had won the prestigious British literary award and its £30,000 (€35,000) prize has been “like this, absolutely chaotic”, referring to the sirens and beeping noises intruding through the open window.
“It was unreal,” says van der Wouden. “You prepare yourself for every single scenario and you try to imagine how you would feel with every single scenario, but you can’t.”
Beyond promoting her work, “I just get to live my life,” says the Dutch-Israeli author. “The Netherlands is a very sober country, so no one goes into any kind of heightened emotion over an author existing.”
“It’s good because I come here and they give me prizes and then I go home and I’m just a lady in a store,” she says.
Van der Wouden’s debut was up against stiff competition for the prize, including novels by established American writers Elizabeth Strout and Miranda July, along with three other debuts: The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis and Good Girl by Aria Aber.
In her acceptance speech, van der Wouden shared that she was intersex. “I was a girl until I turned 13, and then as I hit puberty all that was supposed to happen did not quite happen, or if it did happen it happened too much,” she said. “I won’t thrill you too much with the specifics but the long and the short of it is that hormonally I am intersex.
“This little fact defined my life throughout my teens until I advocated for the healthcare that I needed.
“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.”
What prompted her to share this information? “To me, that’s an integral part of my life and the conversations I have with myself, with my friends and family, with my trans loved ones,” she says. So why now? “Because it just happened to be that the moment where I and a room full of 800 people met for the first time and so they got to hear me speak for the first time. But it’s not anything new on my part. It simply was a new moment for all of us together.”
Creativity comes from curiosity. And when you’re in survival mode, there’s no space for curiosity
The Safekeep, which also made the Booker Prize shortlist last year, is based on a repressed and melancholic central character, Isabel, whose world is upended when her brother’s girlfriend, Ava, stays with her for the summer. A passionate love affair develops between the women, leading to a thrilling plot twist that van der Wouden asks me to be careful not to reveal. It is not exposing too much to say the novel, set in the Netherlands in 1961, concerns itself with the legacy of the second World War.
Does she think there might be a through-line between how the Dutch government of the time treated Jewish people during the war and its contemporary policies under its right-wing government? “The Netherlands has a specific penchant in using bureaucracy as a form of violence, against migrants, immigrants, refugees, poor people, marginalised people.
“This happened in the fallout of the war, this happened with every single migrant crisis that the country has had, and this specifically happened also around what we call the ‘toeslagenaffaire’.” This was a scandal in which Dutch tax authorities used an algorithm to spot suspected benefits fraud. It penalised many low-income, ethnic-minority families.
“And that’s what I mean with using bureaucracy as a form of violence: using the minutiae of forms and documents and having people fill in that and fill in that ... the small things that you don’t think represent violence and end up creating so much suffering for so many people.
“I don’t think [the Netherlands] is unique in that, but I can only speak to my country,” she adds.
Being an artist in the Netherlands is more difficult than ever, she says, with funding being “slashed” in education and the arts. She says her parents, both of whom are animators, received a universal income when they moved to the Netherlands, where her father is from, when van der Wouden was 10, after the family had spent the first decade of her life living in her mother’s native Israel.
She is now in the very privileged position of being an author who can live off her work, she says, but all of her friends working in education and the arts are struggling. “They are all splitting themselves in so many ways just to make ends meet and it’s hard to do that and keep going, and allow themselves to [be creative]. You can’t and it’s devastating, and it’s infuriating.
“Anxiety shuts down the desire for creativity, but also the ability to be curious, and I think creativity comes from curiosity. And when you’re in survival mode, there’s no space for curiosity. There’s only the next moment, the next day. How will I pay rent? How will I eat?
“I’ve spent many years [where] I’ve been on welfare, I’ve definitely lived off ramen, while trying to avoid medical checks and getting further and further into debt. I’ve done all of it. And it is possible, but it’s very hard to escape into fantasy and escape into curiosity,” she says.
She also noted in her acceptance speech that the conversation The Safekeep became part of “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.
Asked about her relationship with Israel, where her mother is from and where she lived until the age of 10, she says, “I want to be very careful to not create a nostalgic cloud around my childhood, even though my parents made sure I had a fantastic childhood very heavy in the arts ... I had a very creative and very free childhood.
“But I also know that – you know, speaking of what shuts down creativity – living under occupation, living in war, and that’s what many Palestinians experience, have experienced then and still experience now, in even more extreme circumstances.
“And I’m in stark opposition to the [Israeli] government [and] I don’t want my nostalgia for my childhood to overshadow that,” she says.
On whether she would set a novel in Israel, she says: “I think I would set a novel in a diaspora that is connected to there, but I don’t think it’s possible for me to set a novel entirely there because I left when I was 10, so it would be the perspective of a 10-year-old in one way or another. But perhaps one day, you never know. But for now, we’re sticking to the Netherlands for a little while longer.”
She completed a draft of her second novel just before going to London for the Women’s Prize festivities. In her research for the book, set in a Dutch fishing village in 1929, she found further evidence of the then-government’s use of what she terms “bureaucracy as violence”, as many of the men who lost their jobs in the process of the South Sea being closed off from the North Sea in the early 1930s never received the funding they were promised.
And there is also a titillating premise to the novel likely to pique the interest of fans of The Safekeep: a married woman enlists the help of another woman to seduce her husband and frame him for adultery so she can divorce him.
Asked why she writes in English, she says her parents mainly spoke English to each other when she was a child, although her mother is now an excellent Dutch speaker. “I was three years old and my parents were still rummaging around the apartment, and I was already at the door with my little dress and my little sunglasses, very impatient to leave the house. And then I shouted at them, ‘Let’s go, we gotta go!’ And suddenly they realised that they were raising a child in English,” she says, laughing at the memory.
Van der Wouden has also spoken previously about her love of The Bee Sting by Irish author Paul Murray, and asks, laughing, if I have a spare three hours to discuss its merits. She particularly admires how Murray portrays Imelda, a leading character whose inner life and background are revealed as the book progresses.
“With Imelda, you think, because up until that moment you only see her through the other characters’ perspective, and she’s quite awful in their POV [point of view]. And then you go to her POV and, honestly, that was ... the most wonderful experience of being proven wrong about a character and falling in love with character, but the language just completely upended my understanding of what we could do with language in character work in novels. And she still is, and I think forever will be, one of my favourite characters in literature.”
