'Elizabeth Young was the great, British, counter-cultural author and literary critic, who we had - but didn't really deserve; whose elegance, sang-froid, erudition and love of the bizarre were yoked to a rare ability to fully enter into - and even inhabit - the imagined worlds of other writers. Young was a fearless champion of fearless writing, a merciless opponent of cant, convention and hypocrisy, whose prose could progress effortlessly from the painfully direct, to the gnomic, to the discursive, to the outright quirky. She despised sentiment - she didn't know what whimsy was.
'In the last years of her life Young wrote a number of long, scrupulously researched and deeply felt articles on the issues surrounding illegal drug use. She was an implacable opponent of the "War on Drugs", and her own experience of addiction led her to endorse the traditional British model of harm minimisation. It is to be hoped that, in view of her own premature death, and those of many thousands of others, that her brave, lucid voice - utterly devoid of self-pity - will continue to be heard.' -- Will Self
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'It would be easy to (mis)represent Liz as a punk (or Goth) version of the Wildean aesthete. Somehow she emerged from the wreckage of the New Wave music scene in west London as an author, critic and commentator armed with a knack of mischievous paradox, a staggering depth of literary knowledge, and a taste for the far reaches of the counter-culture - the dark (but merciful) angel of the Westway. But the Wilde analogy holds only if it stresses that, like Oscar, Liz was just as much a moralist as well. In the florid margins of literature and art she found a diagnosis of the malaise hidden in the dull, dead centre of consumer society: "the affectlessness, boredom and spiritual poverty of privilege".' -- Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
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'Despite coming from a very privileged background, Young also moved in what might quaintly be described as “low-life” circles for the whole of her adult life, and partly as a result of this she wrote from a liberal position that was on the whole to the left of her broadsheet colleagues. Liz had a difficult existence and hard drugs, as well as books, were her retreat from the world. It was typical of Young that if something didn’t interest someone, she’d try to keep the subject out of her interchanges with them, no matter how important the matter was to her. While I agree with much of what Liz wrote about the persecution of heroin users, I have never found drug rushes very enthralling. Once Young realised this, she rarely spoke to me about narcotics. That said, I do think it was direct experience of repressive drug laws that served as one of the well-springs of Liz’s instinctive sympathy for those she perceived as dispossessed and persecuted.' -- Stewart Home
Elizabeth Young @ Wikipedia
Buy Elizabeth Young's 'Pandora's Handbag'
Buy Elizabeth Young & Graham Caveney's 'Shopping in Space'
Elizabeth Young's obituary @ The Guardian
Elizabeth Young's obituary @ The New Statesman
Stewart Home on Elizabeth Young
'Pandora's Handbag' reviewed @ The Barcelona Review
'Some of (Elizabeth Young's) best pieces are not reviews - they are essays about cats, or fragments of memoir, or authoritative accounts of the state of the short story. Liz simply wrote well - her handful of short stories were excellent and there are years worth of journals sitting in a box somewhere.' -- Roz Kaveney, Glamorous Rags
'No Exit Always Means an Exit' was originally published in the anthology Intoxication: an anthology of stimulant base writing, edited by Toni Davidson (Serpents Tail, 1998)
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