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The Poet Index · Entry 1371

Jackie Kay
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“Jackie Kay was born on 9 November 1961 in Edinburgh, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father.”

Editorial intro

Storgy editorial

Editorial intro

Jackie Kay built a reputation on a single formal invention: the multi-voiced sequence that lets incompatible perspectives on one life speak simultaneously without one winning. *The Adoption Papers*, her 1991 debut, printed the voices of an adoptive mother, a birth mother, and the adopted child in different typefaces on the same page, making the poem's form enact the very problem of belonging it was exploring. That structural move was not decoration; it was the argument.

She sits at an intersection that Scottish literature, Black British writing, and queer poetry all want to claim, and she belongs fully to each tradition without being reducible to any of them. Readers coming to her for the first time are often surprised by the tonal range: the same poet who writes with controlled fury about racism in a Glasgow childhood also writes with warmth and comedy, and her children's books carry the same preoccupations as her adult work without condescension. Her memoir *Red Dust Road* reads as naturally as her poems, and her novel *Trumpet* has been taught as both fiction and as a serious engagement with transgender identity long before that framing was common in literary culture.

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Biographical record

About Jackie Kay

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.

Reader questions

Frequently asked

What is The Adoption Papers and why does it matter?

*The Adoption Papers* (1991) is a poetry sequence told through three voices printed in distinct typefaces: the adoptive mother, the biological mother, and the adopted biracial child. It won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1992. The collection matters because it uses formal structure, rather than argument, to hold together questions of race, identity, and belonging that resist single answers.

What is Trumpet about and what award did it win?

*Trumpet* (1998) is Kay's debut novel, inspired by the life of Billy Tipton, an American jazz musician who was a transgender man. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature in 2000. The novel examines how identity is constructed by those around us as much as by ourselves.

What did it mean for Kay to be the Scots Makar?

The Scots Makar is Scotland's national poet, an appointment Kay held from 2016 to 2021, succeeding Liz Lochhead. The role involves representing Scottish poetry in public life and at official occasions. Kay was the first person of colour to hold the position.

What is Red Dust Road about?

*Red Dust Road* (2010) is a memoir about Kay's search for her biological parents: a Scottish woman who had been a nurse and a Nigerian man who had been a student at Aberdeen University. It won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in the non-fiction category in 2011. The book was later adapted for the stage by Tanika Gupta and premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2019.

How did Kay get her start as a writer rather than an actor?

Kay initially planned to be an actor, but the Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray read her early poetry and told her that writing was what she should be doing. She went on to study English at the University of Stirling, and her first collection appeared in 1991. Her teenage years cleaning houses, including four months working for John le Carré, also shaped her as an observer.

What themes run through Kay's work across poetry, fiction, and memoir?

Questions of belonging, origin, and identity appear across all of Kay's writing: who gets to claim a nationality, a family, a body, a history. These concerns are personal in *The Adoption Papers* and *Red Dust Road*, historical in *The Lamplighter* and the Bessie Smith biography, and fictional in *Trumpet*. Rather than treating identity as fixed, her work consistently shows it as contested and constructed through the stories others tell about us.