Yael van der Wouden

Author

Yael van der Wouden is a Dutch-Israeli author whose debut novel The Safekeep earned her extraordinary critical recognition, including the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction. Her writing explores identity, desire, and the buried histories that shape who we are with precision, emotional intensity, and formal control. Born in Tel Aviv in 1987... to an Israeli mother and a Dutch father, van der Wouden moved to the Netherlands at the age of ten. She grew up trilingually and has described herself as a Dutch-Israeli diaspora child. She studied Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and SUNY Binghamton and now lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her essay "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank," published in The Best American Essays (2018), explored the ways Anne Frank's iconic status complicated van der Wouden's own exploration of her Dutch-Jewish identity — a theme that resonates through her fiction. The Safekeep (2024) is set in the 1960s Netherlands, following Isabel, a tightly wound young woman who lives alone in her family's home, obsessively maintaining order and routine. When her brother's charismatic girlfriend Eva comes to stay, Isabel's carefully controlled world begins to unravel — first through desire, and then through revelations about the house itself and what happened there during the war. The novel was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction. The novel is a work of extraordinary precision and restraint, exploring queerness, complicity, dispossession, and the way history lives in the objects and spaces we inhabit. Van der Wouden writes with a controlled intensity that makes every detail count. The audiobook edition of The Safekeep is a taut, compelling listen. Her book and audiobook are essential for anyone who loves literary fiction that combines emotional intensity with historical depth and formal brilliance. Read more Show less