‘Leaving Her’ by Diana Svennes Smith is one of twelve winning stories from the 2013 Asham award for women writers and is included in the latest Asham anthology, ‘Once Upon A Time There Was A Traveller’, edited by Kate Pullinger and published by Virago this week. Diana was born in Canada and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a teaching-writing fellow before joining the PhD in Creative & Critical Writing at UEA, where she is supervised by Giles Foden. Her fiction has previously appeared in New Zealand in ‘Turbine’ and in Canada in ‘The Fiddlehead’.