Yael van der Wouden

Yael van der Wouden was born in 1991 in Israel and moved to the Netherlands as a child, growing up in a Dutch-Israeli Jewish household. She studied literature and later creative writing, and works as a writer, editor, and critic in the Netherlands. Writing in English as her literary language, she emerged as a significant new voice in international fiction with her debut novel. Van der Wouden's debut novel The Safekeep (2024), a spare, psychologically acute story of a Dutch woman in the 1960s whose orderly life is disrupted by the arrival of her cousin's free-spirited girlfriend, explores property, identity, and the long shadow of the Holocaust's looted Jewish goods in the Netherlands. The novel was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2025. Its precise, controlled prose and its moral complexity regarding Dutch complicity and Jewish identity have made it one of the most acclaimed literary debuts of recent years.