Biography

Jackie Kay (b. 1961) is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays, whose subtle investigation into the complexities of identity have been informed by her own life. Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, she was adopted as a baby by a white couple. Kay’s awareness of her different heritages inspired her first book of poetry, The Adoption Papers, which dramatises her experience through the creation of three contrasting narrators: an adoptive mother, a birth mother and a daughter. The book was a great success, winning the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and a commendation from the Forward Poetry Prize judges. Subsequent collections and her celebrated first novel, Trumpet, have continued to explore issues of cultural and sexual identity as well as the intimacies and upheavals of love. Kay has also written poetry for children and her first children’s novel, Strawgirl, was published in 2002. She currently lives in Manchester.

When Kay began writing “there wasn’t anybody else saying the things I wanted to say…I started out of that sense of wanting to create some image of myself.” However, though she draws on autobiography, Kay is skilful at fictionalising this material, thereby allowing the reader more space to enter her work. The inherent drama of her poetry is influenced by the Scottish tradition of public verse, of ballad, song and the recitations of countless childhood Burns’ nights. Music has also had a significant impact, particularly the rhythms of jazz and blues. This is most obvious in her poems based on the life of the jazz singer, Bessie Smith, but is inherent in all her work, particularly in her use of refrain. Her repetition of lines and phrases is often affiliated with loss, in love poems such as ‘Spoons’ and ‘Her’ or in the wistful elegy for an imaginary childhood friend, ‘Brendon Gallacher’.

This combination of dramatic intensity and musicality lends itself to performance. In her Archive recording, Kay’s Glaswegian lilt is still to the fore, at home in the ‘Old Tongue’ even as she describes her fear of losing it. It’s precisely the rooted quality of her accent that makes the encounters with African culture so powerful, vividly enacting the tensions of her inheritance for the listener.

 

This recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 22 August 2005 at The Audio Workshop, London and was produced by Anne Rosenfeld.

Poems by Jackie Kay

Books by Jackie Kay

Awards

1991

Eric Gregory Award

Prize website
1992

Forward Poetry Prize (commendation), The Adoption Papers

1992

Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award, The Adoption Papers

1992

Scottish Arts Council Book Award, The Adoption Papers

Prize website
1993

Signal Poetry Award, Two's Company

Prize website
1994

Somerset Maugham Award, Other Lovers

Prize website
1998

Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Off Colour

1998

The Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet

1998

The Authors' Club First Novel Award, Trumpet

1999

Signal Poetry Award, The Frog Who Dreamed She was an Opera Singer

Prize website
2003

Cholmondeley Award

Prize website
2005

Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Life Mask

Prize website

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