In accepting the award, Young said:[3] As a brown woman who writes – oftentimes from the margins and smashing gates as I do so – I have seen the transformative power wrought by stories written by us, about us, and for us, as our communities the world over revel in books they can see themselves in, that they can embrace as their own.
The prize acknowledged her fiction writing, utilising of digital publishing to take Samoan stories to a global audience, and also her journalism.
In May 2018 she was the recipient of the Douglas Gabb Australia Pacific Journalism Internship, hosted by ABC News and the Australian Dept of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
In 2017, she was one of 10 "outstanding journalists" from the Pacific selected to report on the 2017 United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in Bonn, Germany.
She is an advocate for survivors of child sexual abuse and has written at length about family violence in Samoa.
Through her, we wished to commend the inventiveness of young people, who are capable of exploring the possibilities offered by the Internet to make themselves known, get published, communicate, exchange, change outlooks, and rattle positions.
[9] In August 2021 she released Mata Oti ('Eyes of Death'), the first Zombie apocalypse story set in Samoa.