New Writer 2023: Alessandra Thom

Alessandra Thom is a Scottish writer from Aberdeenshire. Her fiction has appeared in Gutter Magazine. She holds an MLitt with Distinction in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. She writes literary fiction about life in Aberdeenshire and the central belt, mad women, isolation and the wild natural world. She is currently working on her first novel.

Writing sample

Content warning: please note that the following passage contains strong language and mentions of death, suitable for older teens and adults.

Paula has been counting the ways someone can die on a boat. Drowning – obviously – then there’s breaking your spine or hitting your head before you even hit the water.

Dehydration, floating, lost on a lifeboat, eating your own leg for survival.

Starvation, floating, lost on a lifeboat, unable to even muster up the energy to eat your own leg for survival.

Paula is up on deck, clammy palms gripping tightly to the orange railings, watching gulls plunge into the frothing waters. They shift grey, then black, then grey again. The ferry pitches to and fro.

Niamh pretends she is not scared of the blood dripping into the toilet bowl.

Paula pretends she is not scared of heights.

The ferry left Aberdeen around an hour ago and according to the voice on the tannoy the water is a wee bit choppier than normal but nothing to worry about.

You could get murdered, Paula thinks, but that could happen anywhere. You could crash into one of the thousands of wind turbines which shift in the distance like hungry fish. She wants to run downstairs and show Niamh them but her face was grey when she ran into the loo and also, Niamh told her not to go up on the deck without her because she didn’t want to miss anything. But if Niamh doesn’t know she’s missed anything, has she really missed anything? If Paula’s up on deck without Niamh but Niamh isn’t around to see, is Paula really up on deck?

Paula thinks that question about the tree falling is stupid. They did it in RMPS along with a bunch of other equally stupid questions that she can’t remember now, but she remembers this one because it fucked her off so much. Of course it makes a fucking sound, it’s a fucking massive tree. And just because there are no people around to hear it doesn’t mean there isn’t anything else that can hear. She bets the birds and the ants and the squirrels living in the tree made a fucking sound when it fell. She bets they heard it fall too. If your fucking house fell down, Mr Patterson, I bet you’d hear it fall. And what was it that made the tree fall? Whatever that was would have made a sound too. Even lightning makes a sound, it just takes a while. But Mr Patterson told her she couldn’t know for certain, that it was a great philosophical question and that there was no definitive answer, which was what made it so interesting. Paula had said that it wasn’t interesting, but that it was exactly the sort of thing a man would find interesting. She had got a warning for this, but not sent out of class, which she was pretty pleased about.

Alessandra says:

'I am so happy to have been awarded this incredible recognition by Scottish Book Trust! It was a completely surreal moment. I'm looking forward to all the experiences and support the award offers, and excited to see how my work develops because of it.'