Poet Hollie McNish tells Latitude the word virgin has been used to control, shame and define people.

Hollie McNish says she has always found the concept of virginity "weird and kind of frightening" When the poet Hollie McNish lost her virginity at the age of 19, she stared at her face in the mirror for half an hour, expecting some sort of transformation. She wondered how to stand like a non-virgin so her family would not guess, and worried her parents were looking at her weirdly across the dinner table, while they all ate mashed potato. The word virgin might only have six letters, but not many other words carry as much power, she says. "Virgin is my least favourite word in the English language," she tells an audience of hundreds at Latitude Festival, in Suffolk. "Life is full of first times but nothing else is sold as being powerful enough to change our entire state of being - from virgin to non-virgin." The concept of virginity, and love in general, are the focus of the the 43-year-old's latest collection, Virgin. McNish won the Ted Hughes Award for her book Nobody Told Me, a collection of diary entries she kept from the moment she discovered she was pregnant until her daughter was three