Patricia Young wurde 1954 in Victoria, British Columbia, geboren.
Die feministische Autorin hat seit ihrem Erstlingswerk Travelling the floodwaters (1983) bis heute zehn Gedichtbände, eine Kurzgeschichtensammlung und drei Anthologien veröffentlicht.
Für All I Ever Needed was a Beautiful Room (1987) erhielt sie 1988 den zu den BC Book Prizes gehörenden Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize[3] und zwei Jahre später für The mad and beautiful mothers (1989) den Pat Lowther Award.[4] Als eine der wenigen kanadischen Dichterinnen konnte Patricia Young 1998 den Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize ein zweites Mal gewinnen, diesmal mit What I Remember from My Time on Earth. Für ihre Kurzgeschichtensammlung Airstream, die sie aufgrund einer Umorientierung um 2000 in der Poesie verfasste, wurde sie 2006 mit dem Meltcalf-Rooke Award ausgezeichnet. Darüber hinaus wurde das Werk auf der Shortlist des Butler Prize geführt und gehörte zu den besten Büchern des Jahres laut The Globe and Mail.[5]
Über ihre Schreibphilosophie äußerte sie sich folgendermaßen: “Although I’ve written poetry for twenty-five years, I haven't consciously worked out a personal ‘poetics’. I’m not consciously aware of writing a particular sort of poem, a surreal, lyric, literal or any other kind of poem; I have never tried to fit my poems into any kind of school of thought. I am aware that there is a movement of poets who refuse to write within a narrative or linear framework (going so far as to be rigorously ‘disassociative’) and though I am somewhat sympathetic to their resistance to conventional narrative forms, I personally wouldn’t go so far as to dismiss narrative entirely. I wouldn’t dismiss anything, in fact. I use whatever works for the poem of the moment. I don’t think one sits down and decides, today I will write a totally random poem, or today I will write a traditional narrative poem. The material and/or content influence the shape of the poem. Or, you could say, the poem finds its own shape. The brain craves, I think, some sort of meaning no matter how elliptical or nebulous. To write random lines, without any internal connection, is ultimately boring and meaningless, at least to me. What I do know is that in poetry anything can happen. The freedom to say anything, go anywhere, is, for me, the great pleasure of writing poetry. Being an earthbound creature with all the limitations this implies, I find the liberation of words thrilling.”[6]
Patricia Young ist mit dem Schriftsteller und Universitätsdozenten Terence Young[7][8] verheiratet, hat zwei erwachsene Kinder und lebt in Victoria, British Columbia.
↑Carol L. Beran: All I Ever Needed Was a Beautiful Room. In: Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 39, Herbst 1989, S. 98 f. (Rezension).
↑Judith Kegan Gardiner: All I Ever Needed Was a Beautiful Room. In: Canadian Literature, No. 121, Sommer 1989 (Rezension).
↑Ruin & beauty: new & selected poems. In: The Malahat Review, No. 131, Juni 2000, S. 112–114 (Review).
↑“The dazzling lyric voice, pictorial quality, empathy, and terror of Young’s Ruin and Beauty: New & Selected Poems (House of Anansi) is conspicuous, as is the poet’s interest in the close connection between love and loss. What appears to have changed is the attitude toward experience that informs her writing.” In: A Review of Patricia Young’s Here Come the Moonbathers, Thirsty: A Biblioasis Miscellany. Daily Gleaner, 20. November 2008 (Rezension).