Ashleigh Young awarded prestigious Yale writing prize
The IIML workshop convenor and MA in Creative Writing graduate has won a lucrative Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for her book of essays Can You Tolerate This?
Ashleigh Young has been awarded a prestigious USD$165,000 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for her book of essays Can You Tolerate This? (Victoria University Press, 2016).
The annual prize is administered by Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and is awarded to writers around the globe to support their writing. Ms Young is one of eight prizewinners this year, and the first New Zealand writer to be awarded the prize.
Read more about Ashleigh's win.
Ashleigh completed the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria in 2009, winning that year's Adam Foundation Prize for the manuscript which was subsequently published as Can You Tolerate This? (Read about Ashleigh's MA experience in her own words.) She won the Landfall Essay competition in the same year. She works as an editor at Victoria University Press and has convened the IIML's Science Writing Workshop with Rebecca Priestley. Her first book, the poetry collection Magnificent Moon was published by VUP in 2012. She blogs at eyelashroaming.com.
Can You Tolerate This? has also been longlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, alongside a strong cohort of IIML graduates and staff.