Len Pennie

Career and writing Pennie has worked as a chef.

Her poems include I'm no havin children, contrasting the English "children" with the Scots "weans", Following the online popularity of her posts, she says she received online abuse, including misogyny comedian and nationalist campaigner Janey Godley, author Neil Gaiman, writer Billy Kay,

Pennie was one of five Scots commissioned to write a poem for a local Christmas campaign by Lidl about the Daft Days. A recitation of Robert Burns' Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin was shared by the Scottish Poetry Library, and she performed to over 1,200 people for the University of Saint Andrews' online Global Burns Night and at a National Trust for Scotland's Big Burns Night in January 2021. In February 2021, Pennie was commissioned by a campaign group Witches of Scotland to write and perform a poem for their online video In Memorial, to honour those, mainly women, who were persecuted under the Witchcraft Acts. In November 2020, the Saint Andrew's Society of Los Angeles invited her to write a Scottish diaspora poem which resulted in "Scots Nothin Tae Dae Wae That", and in March 2021 they named her their society's poet laureate.

Poetry collections

Her first collection of poetry Poyums was published by Canongate Books in 2023. It won a British Book Award and was a Sunday Times best seller. Reviewing the collection in The Scotsman, Joyce McMillan lauded it as "show[ing] an impressive command of poetic technique, mainly dodging the doggerel risks of strongly rhyming verse, and sometimes showing an almost Shakespearean command of how to make a sentence flow through a complex rhythmic structure".

Caroline Sanderson in The Bookseller wrote that "With her signature clever rhyming couplets, and arresting titles ... the collections confronts patriarchal norms, gender-based violence and societal injustice with a tender vulnerability, a jousting wit and not a little righteous fury." Reflecting in The Guardian on an interview with Pennie, Alex Clark wrote, "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".

Writing in the Sunday Times, critic Graeme Richardson called the poems, mainly written in anapestic tetrameter "execrable" and Pennie, "the worst poet to have emerged from Scotland since William McGonagall".

Awards

Pennie's first book, Poyums, won the Discover Award at the 2025 British Book Awards, and was shortlisted for the Booksellers Association Books Are My Bag Readers' Awards (poetry category).

In 2025, the Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals (Scotland) recognised Pennie's "inspiring and passionate work to defend and promote the Scots language" by presenting her with the inaugural Presidential Award. Pennie was selected by the then President, Dr David McMenemy for the Award, who stated "Len [is] a brilliant champion of public benefit, preservation of knowledge and intellectual freedom, three of the key pillars of our profession’s ethical values."

Radio Scotland career Until April 2026 when her programme was dropped, Pennie regularly presented an arts and culture slot in the Michelle McManus afternoon show on the station. The guests on the programme included Award-winning Scottish folk musician, writer and storyteller Karine Polwart, actors Juliet Cadzow and Sanjeev Kohli, American writer and director Charlie Kaufman and artist Vicky Paul.

Personal life

In March 2024, Pennie revealed she had been in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship. Her ex-partner pled guilty in court to domestic violence and was sentenced to a two-year behavioural programme and made subject to a three-year non-harassment order.