'I think the lived experience is the most impactful tool to help people change,' says rapper and poet Bee Asha Singh. 'I want men to hear it and understand the perspective of a woman in all these situations in relationships.' We're talking about Singh's debut album From Girl To Men, which she released mere weeks before being named Best Newcomer at 2021's Scottish Alternative Music Awards.

Moving between grime, softly-sung ukulele numbers and spoken word, Singh narrates different relationships with men from throughout her life. Her lyrics touch on a desire for intimacy, complicated sexual encounters and muddy consent; most viscerally in 'Boys', where a partner spits in Singh's face without asking first.

Three years ago, the BBC documentary Spit It Out showed Singh using her poetry to recover from a rape and its subsequent toll on her mental health. Since then, she and the film's director Léa Luiz de Oliveira have turned Spit It Out into a charity, which explores how people can heal from trauma through creativity. This work feels all the more critical now since Sarah Everard's assault and murder.

'Every conversation was around consent and the danger it is to be a woman and a minority,' Singh says of the period that followed Everard's disappearance. She describes her frustration, as a woman of mixed Scottish and Punjabi heritage, when it emerged that two Black women, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, had disappeared the year before but with far less media coverage. 'I'm glad there was an uproar,' Singh says. 'I'm pissed off that it had to be her that created that. It happens daily. In India at the moment, there are Sikh women being gang-raped and murdered and paraded through the street. This obviously impacts me hard because it's my family. But it's not in the news here.'

Singh has channelled that frustration into her day job with Intercultural Youth Scotland, where she helps to nurture young people of colour's creative talents. 'I wish I'd had it when I was younger. I wish someone had said that I could write, or pushed me to do that in a space with people that were like me. I didn't have anyone like me.' The value of this space lies not only in the confidence it can instil in its young people, Singh says, but also the greater visibility it generates within Scotland's creative industries.

Her own nomination for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award is a case in point. This year the prize acknowledged that diverse voices in Scotland have historically been excluded, and removed its criteria that entrants' parents must be born in Scotland. Creative opportunities are beginning to open up for Singh's young charges, she says, but meaningful change still seems some way off. 'The funding isn't there to support young people of colour in the way it needs to be, because they're still seen as such a small part of Scotland. Each culture, everyone's upbringings, are so different and they all need to be nurtured in different ways. There needs to be people with that lived experience to help them get to that place.'

Bee Asha Singh plays Amplifi, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, Wednesday 16 March.