Terence Young lives in Victoria, B.C., where he has recently retired from teaching English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. He is a co-founder of The Claremont Review, an international literary journal for young writers. His first book of poetry, The Island in Winter, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Since then, he has published several books: a collection of stories, Rhymes With Useless, which was one of two runners-up for the annual Danuta Gleed award; a novel, After Goodlake's, which received the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2005; and a second collection of poetry, Moving Day, which was nominated for both the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and The City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for 2006. In 2008, he was awarded the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence, an honour shared with fifteen other teachers from across Canada that year. In 2010, he published a second collection of fiction, The End of the Ice Age. More recently (2019), he received a National Magazine Award (Silver) for his poem "The Bear." His third collection of poetry, Smithereens, came out in 2021.
