Ashley Hay works as a writer, editor, facilitator and mentor. Between 2018 and 2022, she was the editor of Griffith Review, curating, commissioning and creating sixteen editions of Australia's leading quarterly of great writing and new ideas. She is now back in the business of making her own sentences and you can read her first piece for 2023 – part of the lovely Guardian series 'What Makes Me Happy Now' – here, and contribute to the dog's moment of fame ....
Ashley’s most recent novel, A Hundred Small Lessons, was published in Australia in April 2017, in the US in November 2017 (as celebrated by USA Today), in the UK in early 2018, and in Italy in 2020. Its first review came with five stars from Books+Publishing. You can read an extract from that review over here, and you can read more reviews here and here. Her conversation with ABC-RN's Kate Evans at the 2017 Sydney Writers' Festival is also available here.
Ashley's first novel, The Body in the Clouds, published in Australia in 2010, was published in the US in July 2017: you can see two beautiful trailers for it here and here, and you can read James McNamara's lovely review of it for the New York Times here.
Her second novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, was published in Australia, the UK and the US, and in translation. It was awarded the Colin Roderick Prize ("for the best book published in 2013 reflecting Australian life") by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies and also won the People’s Choice Award at the 2014 NSW Premier’s Prize. It was longlisted for that year's Miles Franklin and Nita B. Kibble awards, and shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Prize. A new edition was later published by TwoRoads in the UK.
Her essay, "The Bus Stop" (which won a prize in Creative Nonfiction's edition on The Weather) was selected for inclusion in Best Australian Essays 2016. And her essay, "The Forest at the Edge of Time", won the 2016 Bragg/UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing and was selected for inclusion in that year’s Best Australian Science Writing anthology. In 2021, she released a revised and updated of her narrative non-fiction book, Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions.
She lives in Brisbane, just in from the eastern edge of Australia.