Ashleigh Young
Ashleigh Young is an essayist and poet, and an editor at Victoria University Press. She gained an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2009, winning the Adam Prize. Can You Tolerate This? won the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Non ction. In this same year Young received a prestigious international award, the Windham- Campbell Prize.
All essays by Ashleigh Young
The Te Kūiti Underground
What amazed me was not just that Beck had written back to me. It was that he had written the words ‘New Zealand’. He’d said the secret code word that granted us access to the rest of the world. And he was interested to know what it was like here. It didn’t seem an idle interest, but a genuine one. He was so interested that he’d said ‘Wow’.
Sep. 2017 •
NZ-Aotearoa