Literary Prize Winner Uses Acceptance Speech To Advocate For Intersex Community

Dutch novelist Yael van der Wouden has won this year’s Women’s Prize for fiction with her debut novel The Safekeep, and used her acceptance speech to publicly share her experiences as an intersex woman, as well as advocate for the necessity of adequate healthcare for trans and gender diverse people.

In her acceptance speech on Thursday, van der Wouden thanked the judges and, for the first time in public, spoke about her experiences as an intersex woman.

“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.

“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.”

Debut novel heralded as a “classic in the making”

The Safekeep explores repressed desire and the treatment of Dutch Jews in the aftermath of World War II. It follows the solitary Isabel who has her strictly controlled life upended when her brother’s new girlfriend, Eva comes to stay for the summer.

Chairwoman of the judges for the fiction prize, writer Kit de Waal, said the novel was “a classic in the making, a story to be loved and appreciated for generations to come. Books like this don’t come along every day.”

Van der Wouden said that in the years since she finished writing her book, “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.”

Van der Wouden will receive £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze statuette known as the Bessie, which was created and donated by artist Grizel Niven.