Ashleigh Young longlisted for 2019 Folio Prize

New Zealand writer Ashleigh Young has been longlisted for the UK’s £30,000 (A$56,000) Rathbones Folio Prize for her essay collection Can You Tolerate This? (Giramondo).

Can You Tolerate This? is a collection of 21 personal essays that ‘tells the story of a girl growing up in a small New Zealand town and making her way as an adult into the wider world’. Young was previously awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction for the book in 2017.

Among the longlisted titles are Sally Rooney’s Costa Book Award-winning Normal People (Faber), Anna Burns’ Man Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman (Faber) and US author Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There (Vintage).

The Rathbones Folio Prize is awarded to the best work of literature, regardless of form, written in English and published in the UK. This year’s prize money has increased by £10,000 (A$18,600) since last year, when Richard Lloyd Parry was awarded the prize for Ghosts of the Tsunami (Viking), his investigation of the 2011 Japanese earthquake.

The shortlist will be announced on 4 April, with the winner to be announced on Monday, May 20. To see the full longlist, visit the Folio Prize website.

Category: Awards Local news