Sarah Young

Sarah investigated the poethics of the witness and the narration of traumatic affect.

PhD awarded 2025

PhD candidate Sarah Young. (Photo by Xavier Demoulin.)

Sarah Young lives in Wellington. She completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing (Prose) at the University of East Anglia in the UK in 2014, where she was the UEA Booker scholarship recipient. She has been shortlisted for the Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellowship in Bulgaria and the Newsroom Surrey Hotel Writers Residency and long-listed for the Bath Short Story award and the BBC National Short Story award in the UK. She has also published essays in Strong Words 2 and Hinterland Magazine (UK). She formerly worked as a journalist in Dubai, Indonesia, and New Zealand.

Sarah's thesis investigated 'stuckness' as an 'unscripted dimension of suffering' in fiction, and the immobilising effects of chronic trauma upon novelistic conventions. Her novel and thesis exploring Pip Adam's fiction suggest new ways of writing about knotty attachments and harm without relying on the reductiveness of the 'trauma plot'.