Patricia Young was born in Victoria in 1954 and grew up in Victoria and Kitimat. She has worked on The Malahat Review and taught creative writing at UVic.

Her poetry collection All I Ever Needed Was A Beautiful Room (Oolichan, 1987) won the Livesay B.C. Poetry Prize in 1988 and she received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award in 1990 for her fourth book of poetry The Mad and Beautiful Mothers. Her 1997 collection What I Remember from my Time on Earth (Anansi) is about estrangement and connection. She has also published Those Were the Mermaid Days (Ragweed, 1991) and More Watery Still (Anansi, 1993) in which "hidden truths about women are shared with wry irony." Her first and second titles are Travelling the Floodwaters and Melancholy Ain't No Baby. Her debut fiction collection of fourteen stories for Airstream (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2006) gained her the first Metcalf-Rooke Award. With her first collection of poetry in nearly a decade, Patricia Young ventured into darker and even tragic territory, exploring both power and loss, sometimes with a surreal edge, in Here Come the Moonbathers (Biblioasis, 2008). An Auto-Erotic History of Swings (Sono Nis, 2011) is a collection of poems about sex, god and 'sublime imagination', that includes quotations from Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), an English physician who wrote about sexuality and argued with Freud. Her collection The Night-Eater (Quattro, 2012) was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2013. In Summertime Swamp-Love, Young examines the mating habits of mammals, fish, birds and insects, playing with the reader's erotic imagination to hilarious and poignant effect (Palimpsest Press, 2014).

Patricia Young’s 13th collection of poems Amateurs at Love (Goose Lane, 2018) explores the dynamics between lovers. To the question of what is love, she answers: “I think it means a boxcar going off the rails, grain spilling down a gully, fermenting over summer, a bear gorging on that grain, passing out in a field, a bear that could wake any moment, hung-over and thirsty and ready to kill for a drop of water.”

BOOKS:

Travelling the Floodwaters
Melancholy Ain't No Baby
All I Ever Needed Was A Beautiful Room (Oolichan, 1987)
The Mad and Beautiful Mothers
Those Were the Mermaid Days (Ragweed, 1991)
More Watery Still (Anansi, 1993)
What I Remember from my Time on Earth (Anansi)
Ruin and Beauty
Airstream (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2006)
Here Come the Moonbathers (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2008) $17.95 978-1-897231-43-2
An Auto-Erotic History of Swings (Sono Nis, 2011) $14.95 978-1-55039-178-7
The Night-Eater (Quattro Books, 2012)
Summertime Swamp-Love (Palimpsest Press, 2014)
Amateurs at Love (Goose Lane, 2018) $19.95 978-0-86492-991-4

[BCBC 2018] "Poetry" "Fiction"