Yael van der Wouden Audiobooks

Booker-shortlisted, then a Women's Prize winner: The Safekeep did both at the first attempt

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★ 4.2/5 average

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Who is Yael van der Wouden?

Yael van der Wouden, born in 1987, is a Dutch writer with one of the most striking debuts in recent memory. Her first novel, The Safekeep, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, and in 2025 she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction – a one-two that most novelists spend whole careers failing to achieve, managed here at the first attempt.

The record beyond that is short, but the facts carry their own weight. A Booker shortlisting followed within a year by the Women’s Prize is not a lucky accident; it is the sign of a writer arriving fully formed, and of two serious prize juries in consecutive years reaching much the same conclusion about her. British readers, it is fair to say, have taken notice.

Yael van der Wouden in audiobooks

The Safekeep is the novel in our catalogue, and its prize record makes the case better than any blurb: Booker-shortlisted, garlanded by the Women’s Prize, and all of it earned by a first book. Literary debuts of this pedigree tend to reward audio particularly well – they are written sentence by sentence, and a good narration gives those sentences the unhurried attention that silent reading sometimes skips.

For UK listeners, this is the rare case where the acclaim is institutional rather than manufactured: two of the most serious prizes in British publishing looked hard at this book and liked what they saw. As an audiobook it is a considered, immersive listen – one to give a quiet evening to, rather than half an ear.