Ashley Hay Ashley Hay i(A4851 works by)
Born: Established: 1971 ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Ashley Hay has won several awards for her short stories, both in Australia and the United Kingdom. She has worked for The Independent Monthly, the University of London, and the Bulletin. Her first book, The Secret, was a biography about the marriage of Annabella Millbanke and Lord Byron.

Hay published her first novel, The Body in the Clouds, in 2010: it was shortlisted for a number of Australian and international awards. The Railwayman's Wife, in 2013, was even more successful, winning the NSW Premier's Literary Awards (People's Choice Award) and the Colin Roderick Award (jointly with Stephen Edgar's Eldershaw) and being longlisted for both the Miles Franklin Award and the Kibble Award.

In 2016, she won the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing, for an essay in the Australian Book Review: 'A Forest at the Edge of Time'.

In 2017, she released her third novel, A Hundred Small Lessons, which was shortlisted for two Queensland Literary Awards.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon A Hundred Small Lessons : A Novel Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2017 10655636 2017 single work novel

'Luminous and deeply affecting, A Hundred Small Lessons is about the many small decisions - the invisible moments - that come to make a life. The intertwined lives of two women from different generations tell a rich and intimate story of how we feel what it is to be human, and how place can transform who we are. It takes account of what it means to be mother or daughter; father or son. It's a story of love, and of life...When Elsie Gormley falls and is forced to leave her Brisbane home of sixty-two years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, with their new life - new house, new city, new baby. Lucy and her husband Ben are struggling to transform from adventurous lovers to new parents and seek to smooth the rough edges of their present with memories of their past as they try to discover their future selves...In her nearby nursing home, Elsie revisits the span of her life - the moments she can't bear to let go; the haunts to which she might yet return. Her memories of marriage, motherhood, love and death are intertwined with her old house, whose rooms seem to breathe Elsie's secrets into Lucy...Through one hot, wet Brisbane summer, seven lives - and two different slices of time - wind along with the flow of the river, as two families chart the ways in which we come, sudden and oblivious, into each other's stories, and the unexpected ripples that flow out from those chance encounters...' (Publication summary)

2017 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards Fiction Book Award
2017 finalist Queensland Literary Awards The Courier-Mail People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year
y separately published work icon The Railwayman's Wife Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2013 Z1927871 2013 single work novel 'In a small town on the land's edge, in the strange space at a war's end, a widow, a poet and a doctor each try to find their own peace, and their own new story. In Thirroul, in 1948, people chase their dreams through the books in the railway's library. Anikka Lachlan searches for solace after her life is destroyed by a single random act. Roy McKinnon, who found poetry in the mess of war, has lost his words and his hope. Frank Draper is trapped by the guilt of those his treatment and care failed on their first day of freedom. All three struggle with the same question: how now to be alive.' (Publisher's blurb)
2013 joint winner Colin Roderick Award With Stephen Edgar's Eldershaw.
2014 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards People's Choice Award
2014 longlisted Kibble Literary Awards Nita Kibble Literary Award
2014 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
2014 longlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
y separately published work icon The Body in the Clouds Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2010 Z1699210 2010 single work novel

'What if you looked up at just the right moment and saw - out of the corner of your eye - something unexpected? What if it was something so marvellous, so extraordinary, that it transformed time and space forever? The Body in the Clouds tells the story of one extraordinary moment - a man falling from the sky, and surviving - and of three men who see it, in different ways and different times, as they stand on the same piece of land. An astronomer in the late 1700s, a bridgeworker in the 1930s, an expatriate banker returning home in the early 21st century: all three are transformed by one magical event. All are searching for the same thing: how to understand what it means to call a place home, and how be able to tell when you get there.

The Body in the Clouds is a luminous novel about the power of story: the stories that define who and where we are. And the stories we tell - and have told, and will tell - for the people we love.' (From the publisher's website.)

2011 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
2012 longlisted International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
2010 shortlisted Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Fiction
2011 shortlisted South East Asia and South Pacific Region Best First Book
Last amended 24 Aug 2018 13:41:16
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