In Conversation with Yael van der Wouden

Winner of 2025’s Women’s Prize for Fiction Yael van der Wouden speaks to Vedrana Velickovic about writing, success, and her debut novel The Safekeep, variously described as lyrical, poetic, thrilling, remarkable, compelling… ‘a story of historical reckoning (or its avoidance)’, ‘a quietly devastating queer love story’..

Yael van der Wouden is a writer and a teacher. The Safekeep, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the 2025 Women’s Prize. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Time, The Economist, Kirkus Reviews, The Times (London), The Independent, BookPage, and others. Yael lives in Rotterdam, Netherlands and is currently working on her second novel.

Dr Vedrana Velickovic is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton where she convenes modules on Queer Writing, Black British, Postcolonial and European Literatures. She is the author of Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literatures and Cultures: Imagining New Europe (Palgrave 2019) and several articles on Black British and post-Yugoslav women’s writers, BrexLit and post-communism. She is also a member of the New Writing South’s Executive Board and co-founder (with Dr Vy Rajapillai) of the DeCol Collective.