Ashly Ananda
is an award-winning essayist, travel narrative author, audio engineer, producer, and vocalist. She is the recipient of the Montana Prize for Humor in nonfiction by the Whitefish Review, judged by Garrison Keiller, which earned her the roles of senior editor for the literary journal and assistant organizer for the 2025 humor prize competition. Ashly has lived in Eivissa, Cataluña, Madrid, Spain, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has traveled extensively throughout Latin America and Europe, and her background is in immigration and Spanish Philology.
Ashly is seeking literary representation for her travel memoir, Nights in Santiago.
A Los Angeles flight attendant leaves her career and risks a loving relationship to spend a month alone in Santiago de Compostela, Spain 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 need?
