Winners of Women’s Prize for Fiction and Nonfiction
Mohan Gulrajani
Women’s prize for fiction goes to debut novelist Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep
Nonfiction award goes to Rachel Clarke’s ‘beautiful and compassionate’ The Story of a Heart, about a lifesaving transplant seen from all sides
Yael van der Wouden (left) and Rachel Clarke. Composite: PR, David Levene
Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden has won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, while British doctor Rachel Clarke took home the nonfiction award.
Van der Wouden’s 'The Safekeep'and Clarke’s 'The Story of a Heart', which made last year’s Booker and Baillie Gifford prize shortlists respectively, were announced as the winners on Thursday evening, with each author awarded £30,000.
Van der Wouden revealed in her acceptance speech that she is 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,” she added. “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.”
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.
The Safekeep is a romantic and family saga set in the Netherlands in 1961 which explores the treatment of Dutch Jews in the postwar period. “This is an impressive debut,” wrote Rachel Seiffert in a Guardian review of the novel. “I already look forward to Van der Wouden’s next. She can draw characters with nuance, without fear too; she creates and sustains atmospheres deftly, and ultimately delivers a thrilling story.”
Chair of the fiction prize’s judging panel, author Kit de Waal, said: “The Safekeep is that rare thing: a masterful blend of history, suspense and historical authenticity … a classic in the making.”
Van der Wouden’s debut trumped novels by the more 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.
Photograph: Abacus
In The Story of a Heart, Rachel Clarke sets the story of two children connected by a heart transplant against the history of heart surgery. “While there is much to be gleaned here about the minutiae of medical inventions and procedures, Clarke never loses sight of the human impact,” wrote Fiona Sturges in her Guardian review of the book.
Chair of judges for the nonfiction prize, journalist Kavita Puri, described Clarke’s book as “authoritative, beautiful, and compassionate.
“This is a book where humanity shines through on every page, from the selfless act of the parents who gift their daughter’s heart in the depths of despair, to the dedication of the NHS workers,” she added.
At the ceremony in London, Bernardine Evaristo also received the one-off outstanding contribution award, which was announced last week and awarded in celebration of the Women’s prize’s 30th anniversary.
Evaristo has never won the prize but was shortlisted for her Booker-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. Winning the £100,000 outstanding achievement prize “more than makes up for it”, she said in a Guardian interview.
De Waal was joined on the fiction panel by the authors Diana Evans and Bryony Gordon, magazine editor Deborah Joseph, and musician Amelia Warner, while Puri’s fellow nonfiction judges were historian Leah Broad, novelist Elizabeth Buchan, academic Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and writer Emma Gannon.
Other books shortlisted for the nonfiction prize were A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, Agent Zo by Clare Mulley, What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales, and Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang.
The nonfiction prize was launched in 2023 after research found that only 35.5% of books awarded a nonfiction prize over the preceding decade were written by women, across seven UK prizes.
This year’s prizes were open to novels and nonfiction books written in English and published in the UK between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025.
The inaugural nonfiction winner was Naomi Klein for Doppelganger. Last year also saw VV Ganeshananthan named the fiction winner for Brotherless Night. Past winners of the fiction prize include Zadie Smith, Ali Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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