Jade Ulani Young (tau iwi, tangata te Tiriti) is a transdisciplinary artist and writer working across experimental literature, interdisciplinary performance, songwriting, and applied philosophy of language. Their short story The DSM6: Revenge of the Neurodivergents’ was broadcast on Ōtepoti Access Radio (OAR FM) and later featured on the Wondering Woman Podcast. Their piece Solar Storm appears in Hoot! Hoot!, an anthology from the Ōtepoti Writers Lab.

Jade was accepted into the 2025 Hagley Writers’ School and has been mentored by Joanna Preston, Melanie Dixon, Rushi Vyas, Liz Brezlin, Danielle Woods, and Rachel Leary, who awarded their short story Television-Like Window a High Distinction.

They hold a Bachelor of Arts (psychological science and philosophy) and a Bachelor of Philosophy (cultural understanding and multidisciplinary perspectives) from the University of Tasmania, where they were placed on the Roll of Academic Excellence and received a scholarship for outstanding achievement. They are currently writing an honours thesis titled Re-thinking ‘Psychosis’ for Epistemic and Social Justice.

A multi-award winning singer/songwriter, their creative practice spans ecclectic and inter-secting forms. Their poetry appears on their debut EP The Eye of the Day, recorded by ARIA Award winner Monique Brumby after mentorship from Wally De Backer (Gotye). They have contributed to collaborative performance projects shown at MONA FOMA and recognised by Melbourne Fringe. Their current major project is an experimental literary novel, The Edge of Words, set in the town of Words, where each resident personifies a word. The work layers fantastical word-art play with social commentary and philosophy, investigating the power of language to both liberate and oppress. 

Jade’s experimental plays include The Eavesdropper, a surrealist work featuring a woman on a botanical-garden bench speaking aloud everything she has overheard. Works in progress include Holy Emeralds and White Nike Shoes and Safe Word: the first is a dark comedy about spirituality gone wrong, and the second examines the importance of free, enthusiastic, and informed consent in an entertainment context. The show does not have to go on.

Their novel, The Edge of Words, is the fifth in a six-novel challenge Jade set for themselves to become a writer. It follows earlier long-form works including Autotherapy: A Video Diary Experiment; Imbroglio, a chronological document of worded thought; The Functions of a Belief, a queer novel about a group of friends; and Before I Turn into Ash: Omissions, an experimental stream-of-consciousness memoir originally improvised through vocal recordings and later restructured to explore memory, selective retellings, and erasure.

The final work in the series, Pain, Like the Oyster’s Pearl, draws on their honours research to craft a long literary letter to Virginia Woolf, rethinking psychosis, affirming neurodiversity, depathologising protective responses—much like the pearl an oyster forms around an irritant—contextualising trauma, and celebrating what words can offer one another.

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