The 85-year-old woman whose harrowing story is at the heart of Bart van Es’s The Cut Out Girl was in attendance to watch him win the £30,000 Costa book of the year award for the biography, which judges called “extraordinary”.



Van Es and Lien de Jong embraced on stage in front of a packed room after he was announced as winner at the awards on Tuesday night. “Without family you don’t have a story. Now I have a story … Bart has reopened the channels of family,” she said.

The Cut Out Girl beat Sally Rooney’s widely praised novel Normal People, Stuart Turton’s debut novel The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, JO Morgan’s poetry collection Assurances and Hilary McKay’s children’s book The Skylarks’ War to the award for the year’s “most enjoyable” book. Won in the past by authors including Sebastian Barry, Hilary Mantel, Helen Macdonald and Helen Dunmore, it brings with it a guaranteed sales boost along with the £30,000 cheque.

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“It’s a very important book. It’s a story that would never have been told if he hadn’t gone in search of it. We all thought it had huge resonance with today, the number of displaced people there are today and the number of stories that go untold,” said the chair of judges, the BBC presenter Sophie Raworth. “It’s beautifully written, very understated. We were all very much surprised by it. It very much felt like a hidden gem that we really wanted to put the spotlight on.”

Van Es, a professor of English at Oxford, knew his grandparents had been part of the Dutch resistance, and of the young Jewish girl – De Jong – who had been in hiding with them. But the family had fallen out with De Jong in the 1980s, and he began to wonder what had happened to her. He tracked her down in Amsterdam, and after initial awkwardness – “you wrote in your email about being interested in the family history and about maybe writing a book ... Well, the family thing doesn’t really play for me. The Van Eses were important in my life for a long time, but not now,” she told him – they struck up a friendship.

De Jong, it turned out, had kept a great deal of documentation about her life, including the letter her mother had sent to the family who would raise her daughter. “She has been taken from me by circumstance. May you, with the best will and wisdom, look after her,” she wrote in August 1942.

The Cut Out Girl is Van Es’s piecing together of De Jong’s difficult youth; after she left the Van Eses she lived with another family who treated her as a servant and sexually abused her. It is also an exploration of Dutch cooperation in rounding up Jews for the Nazis. Raworth said that of around 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands in 1940, 105,000 were dead by May 1945.

Van Es, speaking after his win, said it had not been hard to track De Jong down despite the family split. Although his grandmother had ordered the family not to speak to her again, his mother had stayed in touch with her and she was happy to meet him for a coffee. “It was just nice to meet him,” said De Jong.

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She said she was surprised the story of her life had won the Costa award, which was judged by a panel made up of Raworth, Prue Leith, Kate Humble and Simon Williams. “I loved the book but I didn’t expect it,” said De Jong. “We were in hiding, but after the war, nobody spoke about it. It was not an issue, it was not a subject. So nobody spoke about it during the war or after the war. I once said that I’d been born after the war. My feeling is, I just started after the war. The time before that, I had no words ... I never thought I had a story, but Bart wrote it down and it was a story.”

The two are now good friends. “We are both quite straight people. We like to say things as they are,” said Van Es. “I feel I have never known anyone as well as I know Lien ... Lien just had that total trust of saying, I will give you my life.”

He said he would use his winnings to pay for a “very nice family holiday”. Asked what he planned to write next, he said his mother was keen for him to look into the life of her father, who was the son of a white Suriname plantation owner and a black plantation worker.

• This article was amended on 31 January 2019, to correct the decade that the Van Es family and De Jong initially parted ways.