When Len Pennie’s debut, poyums, won the discover book of the year prize at this year’s British Book awards, it was the first poetry collection to do so for 10 years, and the first winner written in Scots as well as English. It’s likely that the 25-year-old can claim another first: she must be the only winner to have had her ID checked at the awards ceremony to verify her age.

It’s true that Pennie is strikingly fresh-faced. She doesn’t drink alcohol (she often finds herself tidying up and doing the recycling at parties, and when I suggest that she must be a popular designated driver, she laughs and tells me she hasn’t got a licence. “I’m useless and sober!”). But she has been through experiences that by rights might put years on a person.

She started writing poetry because she was doing so much cross-stitch embroidery that she had the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome. And the reason she was sewing with such ferocity in the first place was because, while still a student and in the midst of the pandemic, she had just left an abusive relationship she had been in since she was 17. Now, hands and heart hurting, she turned her focus to something else that was “cheap, portable and doesn’t require specialist skills”.

Her first poem was Honey: “You called me honey though I said it pained me, / and day after day you bit down and you drained me, / of blood, of nectar, of hope, and desire, / and you opened the stove and threw me on the fire”. It appears in poyums, which became the bestselling debut poetry collection of 2024, which Pennie has now followed with the collection poyums annaw.

But in those early days of writing, publication wasn’t the goal – indeed, many of her pieces were performed to a camera, shared on social media and not written down until the book became a possibility. Neither was writing cathartic: “Poetry isn’t therapy, therapy is therapy,” she insists. “So I was on medication, I was getting therapy, I was putting the effort into making myself mentally healthy, and the poetry was a way to document that journey.”

It was also a way to reassert some control over her life and to take the steps into young adulthood that had been denied her. “How do you date? How are you a student? How do you get a job? How do you fill all these roles that you have: to be a daughter, be a friend, re-establish all those connections that have been severed?”

Pennie and her abuser had lived together during lockdown. It was only when the restrictions made clear that those extricating themselves from abusive relationships could leave that bubble that Pennie telephoned her family, who arrived an hour and a half later and piled her and her belongings into their car. She describes the early days as a form of withdrawal from the relationship’s toxicity; her mother slept beside her, and she even considered returning to “fix things”.

Pennie and I are sitting in a coffee shop in Edinburgh ahead of her appearance at the city’s book festival, and she stresses how much performing her work is central to her sense of herself as a writer. Once again it’s evident that, while her confidence in the creative arena is impressive, the process started very differently. “I liked how it felt to write poetry,” she explains of those first days. “It’s a weird thing, but it’s a visceral thing. People assume that you’re sitting with a quill at a desk. I was writing poetry on the bathroom floor in between heaving sobs. I was writing it in bed. I was writing it at my lowest ebb, because it felt like a kind of thought experiment: if I can make this rhyme, if I can sit with this thought, I can process it. By the time you find the words that rhyme with your pain, it doesn’t have the same impact.”

The first poem she posted online was called I’m No Havin Children, not a meditation on motherhood, but on language. The imaginary children will be called weans, “and they’ll be gettin a piece, no a wee packed lunch; / and they’ll be haein a scran, no having a munch”; and the poem is not just about different vocabulary and idiom but language as a powerful sociopolitical phenomenon. “I grew up in a house where Scots and English were used interchangeably,” Pennie says of her childhood in Airdrie, “and it was just a real culture of joyful linguistic expression.” It was a shock to realise as she grew older that speaking Scots was, for many, a source of stigma and shame, a signifier of a lack of education or resources. But the antipathy towards Scots, Pennie feels, is “just love pointed in the wrong direction”; a way of coping with a system that would marginalise a long-spoken language in favour of a mode of speech and writing more aligned to the establishment.

For the past five years, she has recorded and released a Scots word of the day. “The only way to reduce a vocabulary is through shame,” she says, and tells me how her family and friends all check in to make sure she’s remembered to do that day’s word – even though she often only decides on it just ahead of time. “People think there’s some sort of grand spreadsheet or plan. They ask, what happens if you repeat a word?” She shrugs. “Well, I guess we just double down and say that’s consolidation!”

Pennie has also had more than her fair share of detractors, particularly online. When she posted I’m No Havin Children on Twitter in 2020, it went viral overnight, but there were negative reactions as well as praise. More difficult are the comments that greet her work with victims of domestic violence and abuse, particularly when the publication of poyums coincided with the transmission of a BBC documentary following survivors of abuse through the court system.

Pennie was one of them, having been approached by Victim Support, which was unaware at the time that she was a writer. Pennie’s abuser was convicted of one charge of domestic abuse in October 2023, having changed his plea to guilty on the day of the trial. He was later sentenced to a two-year programme of rehabilitation and a three-year non-harassment order; it had taken four years from initial report to conclusion and, she says, if her case had been dismissed, or found not proven, she would have cancelled the publication of the book.

It is telling that poyums annaw features pieces entitled You’re Capitalising on Your Trauma and Your Poetry Is Shit. But it is also clear that Pennie remains determined to root out stigma and shame and face them down. “One of the things I’ve been very, very keen to do with both book tours and any time I do events is to create a space where domestic abuse is not a taboo word,” she says. “People say to me, what’s your book about? I’m supposed to say, ‘Oh, it’s a journey of healing.’ No: it’s about domestic abuse. And most people lean back, but some people lean in, and those are the people that I want to speak to because they feel seen and they feel like they don’t have to hide it.”

Transparency is also a societal and political imperative; as Pennie points out, advising the abused to leave their abusers without ensuring a safe place to land – financial provision, accommodation, therapy, properly funded agencies and resources – is counterproductive: “You’re not giving people hope. You’re just removing abuse.” Reducing the length of time people must wait to seek justice is also key, as is support through the legal process; charity Action Against Stalking, Pennie remembers, not only provided legal, therapeutic and financial support, but also someone to walk alongside her in the courtroom.

Giving voice to the less tangible aspects of suffering abuse is what art and literature can help to do. Pennie describes wanting to foreground how abuse can manifest itself in peaks and troughs rather than a static state, with the perpetrator switching behaviours: “They’re the best, the loveliest, the kindest, the sweetest – because they’re the one holding you under water, and they’re the ones saving you from drowning.”

But even while Pennie knows she is still dealing with the aftermath of her experience, and that it will continue to find expression in her work, she is just as attracted by the idea of “making art outwith the trauma – pivoting, doing different things. One of the things I’ve enjoyed with the new book has been being able to talk about other things.” Another benefit of her career developing is having the opportunity to introduce readers to poetry, including at school level, where she’ll point out to kids who say they don’t like it that they probably have a favourite rapper. When she first started reading poetry, she felt as though “everyone else is getting this and I’m not. The more people I speak to, I realise none of us are getting it. We’re all thinking we’re the eejit. We’re not.”

It’s time for Pennie to ready herself for her festival appearance. As we say goodbye, she summarises her concerted and multi-directional attempts to banish stigma from everyday life, both hers and ours. “I spent so long being ashamed of who I was that I don’t want anyone else to feel that.”

• poyums annaw is published by Canongate on 25 September. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. For Pennie’s upcoming tour dates, visit https://bit.ly/poyumstour.

• In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.