Edinburgh Book Festival Profile: Len Pennie
From winning a British Book Award to a recent musical collaboration, Allan Radcliffe looks back over Len Pennie's poetry career ahead of her Book Festival appearances
Len Pennie has been a prolific and multifaceted fixture of the Scottish literary scene over the past decade, which is all the more impressive when you consider that she’s still only in her 20s. Hailing from Lanarkshire, she rose to prominence during covid, posting performances of her poetry online as well as her Scots word of the day. Her viral poem, which opens ‘I’m no havin children, A’m gonnae hae weans’, was the centrepiece of her first collection, Poyums, published by Canongate in 2023, which won a British Book Award and was a bestseller.
Since then, Pennie has published a second collection, Poyums Annaw and, until recently, hosted the cultural magazine programme The Arts Mix on BBC Radio Scotland. As befits such a versatile and inexhaustible artist, she is making a series of appearances at this year’s Book Festival, all with different themes and emphases. Pennie appears alongside Sophia Smith Galer, author of How To Kill A Language, in an event entitled ‘Use It Or Lose It’ (Edinburgh Futures Institute, 15 August, 11.45am), focusing on bilingual identity and efforts to revitalise threatened languages.
Later in the month, she will be taking to the sanctuary of Greyfriars Kirk to perform Delusions (27 August, 7pm), her spoken word/musical collaboration with composer Paul Leonard-Morgan that debuted at this year’s Celtic Connections to wide acclaim. The pair will reflect further on their creative partnership in a strand called ‘On Adaptation’ (Edinburgh Futures Institute, 28 August, noon), unpacking the process of putting music to words and vice versa alongside novelist Ali Smith and Emlyn Stam, artistic director of the New European Ensemble.
Picture: Katherine Anne Rose.