Jackie Kay was born on 9 November 1961 in Edinburgh, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as an infant by Helen and John Kay, a white Scottish couple, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow. Her adoptive father worked full-time for the Communist Party and stood for Parliament; her adoptive mother was the Scottish secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Kay's childhood was marked by racism from both classmates and teachers. As a teenager, she worked as a cleaner, including a four-month stint for David Cornwell, who wrote as John le Carré, an experience she later credited as training in close observation. She went on to study English at the University of Stirling, having been directed toward writing by the novelist and artist Alasdair Gray, who read her early poems and told her it was where her talent lay.
Her first collection, *The Adoption Papers* (1991), established her immediately. The book is built around three interlocking voices: an adopted biracial child, her adoptive mother, and her biological mother. It addresses identity, race, nationality, gender, and sexuality without resolving them into easy statements, and it won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1992. The 1994 Somerset Maugham Award followed for *Other Lovers*. When she turned to fiction, her debut novel *Trumpet* (1998) — inspired by the life of jazz musician Billy Tipton, a transgender man — won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.
“Kay's work across forms consistently returns to a cluster of questions: who gets to belong, how identity is shaped by the stories others tell about us, and what it means to search for origin.”
Her 1997 biography of Bessie Smith brought those concerns to bear on a figure whose racial and sexual identity was contested in her own lifetime. In 2010 she published *Red Dust Road*, a memoir recording her search for her biological parents — a Scottish mother who had been a nurse and a Nigerian father who had been a student at Aberdeen University — which won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. Her drama *The Lamplighter*, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2007 during the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act, extended her reach into the history of the Atlantic slave trade.
Her output includes poetry for adults and children, fiction, biography, radio drama, and stage work. Her play *Twice Over*, produced by Gay Sweatshop Theatre Group in 1988, was the first play by a Black writer the company had staged. She was appointed MBE in 2006 and CBE in 2020, both for services to literature. From 2016 to 2021 she served as the Scots Makar, Scotland's national poet, succeeding Liz Lochhead. She held the Chancellorship of the University of Salford from 2015 to 2022 and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. In September 2024, the National Library of Scotland acquired her literary archive.