She’s Some Woman!

At WayWORD, we support women’s rights… and women’s wrongs! Our first book event kicks off with two writers hailing from the North East who explore the lives of women in their work. Award-winning poet Lesley Benzie will read and discuss her contributions to She’s Some Woman: Testaments which celebrates leaders, mavericks, and trailblazers, while debut author Alessandra Thom’s novel, Summer Hours, explores the questionable choices of young queer women during one hot summer in Edinburgh.
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Lesley Benzie is Aberdonian and lives in Glasgow. She won Wigtown’s Scots Poetry Prize in 2024. Previously she received Highly Commended in FWS, Runner-up in McCash Scots Poetry competitions and a nomination for Writer of the Year in the Scots Language Awards. Writing in both Scots and English, her work appears in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she has two poetry collections Fessen/Reared (Seahorse Publications) and Sewn Up. She’s one of three poets in Doric collection, Norlan Lichts (Rymour Books), nominated for a 2022 Scots Language Awards Book of the Year. Leslie’s new work, She’s Some Woman: Testaments, is a collaborative collection with Linda Jackson and Donna Campbell, AKA Wanderlust Women.

Alessandra Thom is a writer from Aberdeenshire based in Edinburgh. She was a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardee for Prose in 2023 and the second-place runner-up in the Short Fiction International Short Story Prize 2024. She has written for BBC Studios and her short stories have appeared in Gutter and Short Fiction. Her first novel, Summer Hours, is set in Edinburgh and is about complex friendships between women, desire, and young queer womanhood.

Find the full programme, including accessibility information, at www.waywordfestival.com