India, July 26 -- 1On winning the Women's Prize for Fiction, you note how you stand on the shoulders of queer and trans people before you. Tell us about the significance of the prize for you? It's a huge honour, first and foremost. The word "woman" as a possessive for me hasn't always been a straightforward one, but my love for stories always has, as has my appreciation for platforms that elevate stories written from the margins. Being acknowledged in this way and read so kindly by the judges, and by so many people, has been a gift, and fully unreal. I've been reading along with the lists for years and can hardly believe I have a little Bessy [the nickname for the bronze statuette] living in my house now. The other day, I caught a glimpse of my new paperback cover on the counter, and now it has the green circle and the word "Winner" on it. I had my first true "Oh my God" moment where the realisation briefly hit home. And then it was gone, and I went back to peeling ginger. 2The Safekeep asks readers to reconsider what they own, and discusses people's possessiveness about objects and land. It also raises a wider question about the idea of theft. Were you deliberately invoking these propositions, or did this simply happen as the story progressed? I come from both a European Jewish heritage and a non-Jewish Dutch heritage. I have grandparents who fled the war, and grandparents who had to live through the German occupation. I grew up in Israel / Palestine, in a city shaped by colonialism and built on the remnants of destroyed Palestinian villages that go unnamed and unremembered in contemporary Israeli memory. The question of choices made in war, of theft and of land and how people deal with those choices after all is said and done, is a question that sits at the core of who I am, my position in history. I have been wanting to write something about that for a long time, and for a while, I figured that something would probably end up being an essay or a long read. The idea for the novel came to me almost as a surprise. But once it did, and once I saw the scope of it play out in my mind, the writing became almost compulsive. It's a conversation I'm having with myself, a meditation on homes, on desire, on who benefits from apologies - the person apologising, or the one who is there to receive? 3While same-sex desires have been viewed as deviant, there's something utterly mechanical but also philosophical about the love between Isabel and Eva. To me, so much of that has to do with the body as it is seen and unseen. Both Isabel and Eva enter into the narrative feeling utterly invisible in their true form. At first, the women despise one another, but there's at least the relief of being despised for who you are, rather than loved for who you're not. The physicality of their desire becomes an extension of that. The physicality is about truth and perception....