From School Prize Winner to Festival Team Member at WayWORD

Literary festival features a collaborative new play by Mae Diansangu.

Millie Hamill won the Nan Shepherd Creative Writing Prize at WayWORD last year, an award for S5 and S6 pupils. She then joined the festival’s committee, where she is now the youngest member.

She has programmed an event of her own and will host it. It’s a panel with BAFTA-winning animator Will Anderson and oral storyteller David Hughes about how they bring characters to life.

WayWORD is the University of Aberdeen’s literary festival, now in its seventh main edition. A team of local young people shapes it and picked the headline events with Rosie Jones and Jenni Fagan. Over the nine days there are more than 30 free and low-cost events.

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A premiere and a new venue

Mae Diansangu, an Aberdeen writer, premieres a new play at Cowdray Hall called A Mustard Seed from a House Untouched by Death. Local writers and performers take part, among them Essa Flett, Oluwatise Abiola-Awe and Sarah Ord.

North East Voices is at St Nicholas Kirk for the first time, following the closure of The Blue Lamp. The annual event mixes local spoken word poets and singer-songwriters, and Rachel Groves, the 2026 BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year, performs.

Elsewhere in the programme

Two other opportunities are open to local creatives who want to share their work: an Ekphrastic Poetry Competition, for poems written in response to artworks, and a new Wine and Performance night.

Historian Ashley Douglas and singer-songwriter Josie Duncan look at Marie Maitland, Scotland’s secret Sappho. Leila Aboulela and Loraine Masiya Mponela talk about experiences of migration, and there are workshops that treat poetry as activism.

One evening pairs poetry with live jazz improvisation. The poets include Hannah Lavery, Taylor Strickland and Aditya Narayan, with saxophonist Matthew Kilner.

WayWORD runs from 3 to 11 October 2026 at the University of Aberdeen campus, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Cowdray Hall and St Nicholas Kirk. More details available at Wayword.

Photo of three people on stage at WayWORD — WayWORD’s main festival has more than 30 free and low-cost events, running 3 to 11 October.

Festival listings

The Gaelic Way of Seeing Workshop

3 Oct | Sir Duncan Rice Library

Gaelic carves up the colour spectrum differently from English. This workshop looks at how, then uses the difference as a starting point for writing poems and songs. The session has a dedicated room to itself, and you can come at the colours through poetry or songwriting.

Our Artworld

3–11 Oct | Sir Duncan Rice Library

Pupils from Riverbank Primary and St Machar Academy responded to the Aberdeen Artworlds exhibition with art and poetry, working with Outlines Collective and Jo Gilbert. A film of their work, designed by festival intern Bethan Ferrie, plays on the foyer screen for the whole festival.

SC&T Youth Concert: Hannah Rarity and Heather Cartwright

3 Oct | King’s Pavilion

Hannah Rarity and Heather Cartwright are the singers on the bill for this concert, presented in partnership with SC&T. It is billed as a youth concert and sits within the festival’s music programming.

Ekphrastic Poetry Prizegiving

3 Oct | Sir Duncan Rice Library

The winners of WayWORD’s Ekphrastic Poetry Prize are announced here. Every entry is a poem written in response to visual art. The prize links to the festival’s partnership with Aberdeen Artworlds: The Linklater Collection, an exhibition at the same library.

Animation and Storytelling Panel

3 Oct | Sir Duncan Rice Library

Will Anderson and David Hughes discuss bringing characters to life on screen. They get into how each of them approaches storytelling through animation. Millie Hamill, the festival’s youngest committee member, programmed the session and hosts it.

Animation Workshop with Jim Parkyn

3 Oct | Sir Duncan Rice Library

Animator Jim Parkyn leads a hands-on workshop on animation techniques. The emphasis is on trying the techniques yourself rather than hearing about them.

Trilingual Open Mic Night

3 Oct | Gaelic Lane Café

This open mic is for poetry in Gaelic, Scots and English, and performers get the floor to share their own work in whichever of the three they write in. It ends the festival’s opening Saturday and fits WayWORD’s commitment to multilingual programming.