Ashly Ananda
is an award-winning essayist and travel narrative author, and an electronic music vocalist and musician. She is the recent recipient of the Montana Prize for Humor in nonfiction by the Whitefish Review, judged by Garrison Keiller. Ashly has traveled extensively throughout Latin America and Europe, and has lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as Madrid and Ibiza, Spain. Her background is in social anthropology, immigration, and Spanish.
Ashly is seeking literary representation for her travel memoir, Nights in Santiago.
A Los Angeles flight attendant risks her career and loving relationship to spend a month alone in Santiago de Compostela to decide if she’s been living the life that she wants. While roaming the rainy streets by day, watching pilgrims arrive to the end of the famous Camino de Santiago, she contemplates her years-long desire to move back to Spain and the love she left behind there. A fateful dusk, she meets a group of Spanish and Basque firemen in town for training and a pair of vivacious Irish women studying abroad at the university. As she falls into the surprising nightlife of Santiago, she is confronted by an inner darkness she thought she’d overcome and faced with the universal question: What are you willing to let go of to have what you want?
