The Women's Prize

The Obsessive Diary - 13th June

Winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep

Well now. If you’re a British woman and a fiction writer it’s likely that the Women’s Prize has long been the holy grail of accolades. It has been for me, and that ring fence extends now globally and into non-fiction; we are multitudes who look up to the event begun by Kate Mosse who, as she told us last night, experienced among other shockers at its creation having her husband told to get his wife in order, that women couldn’t write, and he should be ashamed of himself. Last night was the party, the culmination and prize giving and thirtieth anniversary of this feminist revolution, and we were out in force.

The gardens of Bedford Square in the heart of Bloomsbury were taken over with cocktails, white lounge chairs, sofas upholstered in pink check and low tables as if a very pleasant picnic had been transported to the city complete with vases of flowers, and pillows on which to lay our heads. But I didn’t sit down. Hessian flooring under stitched canvas tents, tensile ropes in thick black prevented drunken broken ankles, a stage set for the celebration of silent hours of hard work amidst the lawn and draping greenery of an urban park where a hundred years ago ladies would have strolled beneath parasols dreaming of the independence that was their right, plotting purple sashed actions to correct the wrongs of misogyny. The evening sun shone.