The annual prize is administered by the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University 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 since it was established in 2013.
Ms Young, who is a creative writing
workshop coordinator at Victoria and an editor for VUP, says when she was first
contacted about the prize she thought it was a hoax.
"A few moments after receiving a
dubious-looking email, I was speaking to a man named Michael Kelleher, in Yale,
Connecticut. He said: ‘So, listen, we’ve all been reading your book.’ It is an
incredible thing to he'ar those words spoken in an American accent. And he said
there was this prize called the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the prize was
$165,000. And I had won it, for my book of essays.
“By this point I was clutching my head and
my knees were giving out. I got off the phone and all my workmates were
screaming. There was a lot of screaming that day. I’m actually still screaming
right now. Just very quietly.”
The nomination process for the prize is
done privately and the phone call from Yale is the first time winners are made
aware of their award. Previous winners of the prize include Helen Garner, Teju Cole, Hilton Als and Tessa Hadley.
Ms Young will receive the prize money in
September, when she travels to Windham-Campbell Festival at Yale. Ms Young says she’s finding it hard to
accept that the prize is real.
“I’ve always
thought of myself as ‘a small writer’. Someone who could only ever write in the
margins, and only ever about her small experiences. But this truly
mind-boggling honour means that suddenly, a dreamlike opportunity has opened up
in front of me – to bring writing into the heart of my life and to have faith
that it’s the right thing. I feel a gratitude that I can’t find words for. The
generosity of the prize is completely astounding.”
Can You Tolerate This? is a collection of 21 personal essays
with content that ranges from Hamilton’s nineties music scene to a
stone-collecting French postman, family histories to Bikram yoga.
Ms Young began the collection during her
Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Victoria’s International Institute of
Modern Letters, and won the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing for her
Master’s manuscript. She has also published a collection of poems, Magnificent
Moon (VUP, 2012).
Can You Tolerate This? has also been longlisted for the 2017
Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
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