Dutch author makes Booker Prize shortlist with The Safekeep

Yael van der Wouden has become the first Dutch author to be included in the prestigious Booker Prize shortlist for her post World War II novel The Safekeep.

The book is “a remarkable debut about obsession and loss, set in an isolated Netherlands house,” the judging panel said of the book. “The author draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life.”

Van der Wouden, who studied in the United States, has previously written short and narrative fiction in English, and wrote the novel in English.

She told the Booker Prize website she had been inspired to write it while driving back from a funeral. “I was in the car on the way back from a funeral, looking out over flat Dutch fields, and somewhere between grief and a need to escape the idea bloomed, of a house, a woman and a stranger.”

This year, five of the shortlist of six are women, the largest number of women in the Booker Prize’s 55-year history. The authors come from five countries.

In 2020, Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld won the International Booker Prize for the best novel in translation with her debut novel The Discomfort of Evening (De avond is ongemak).

You can get your copy of The Safekeep at the American Book Center.