Jewish author Yael van der Wouden has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 for her debut novel which explores the legacy of the Holocaust.
Van der Wouden’s The Safekeep is one of three debuts nominated in the longlist of 13 books.
Described by the publisher as “a tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge”, The Safekeep sparked a frenzied publishing bidding war, with Viking winning the UK rights after a nine-way auction. Viking’s editorial director Isabel Wall called it the most “original” and “exhilarating” novel she had read in a long time.
“I was so impressed by Yael van der Wouden’s ability to combine a gripping tale of desire and obsession between two women with a powerful examination of the legacy of the Holocaust and the darker parts of our collective past,” she said. “I cannot wait to share it with readers.”
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Set in an isolated house in early-1960s Netherlands, the book was praised by the judging panel as “carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life”.
The judges said, “We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.”
The writer was born in Tel Aviv and brought up the Netherlands, where she lives and lectures in creative writing and comparative literature. She has an Israeli mother with Bulgarian and Romanian heritage and a Dutch father. Her essay On (Not) Reading Anne Frank – on Dutch identity and Jewishness – had a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018.
The 2024 judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; fiction editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.
Also longlisted is the Canadian poet and author Anne Michaels, who has a Polish-Jewish father and is best known for Fugitive Pieces, about a Holocaust survivor and the child of a survivor. Adapted for the screen in 2007, that novel won the Orange Prize for Fiction and Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, among others. Michaels has also been shortlisted for the 2019 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature.
Her “brief kaleidoscopic” longlisted novel Held has been championed by the Booker judges as “transporting” and a “unique experience”.
The panel said, “Michaels is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time.
"Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind.”
The Booker Prize judges’ selection was made from 156 books of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland, and published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024.
The shortlisted six books will be announced on 16 September at Somerset House in London, and the winner will be crowned at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London on 12 November. The winning author will receive £50,000.
