Jackie Kay’s writing moves between poetry, fiction, drama and memoir, giving close attention to the ways identity is shaped by family, race, nationality, gender and sexuality. Her first book, The Adoption Papers, made those questions the subject of a three-voiced sequence; later works, including the novel Trumpet and the memoir Red Dust Road, carried her interests into different forms. From 2016 to 2021 she served as Scotland’s Makar, bringing a writer whose work crosses genres into a national literary role.

Growing up between stories

Born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Kay was adopted as a baby by Helen and John Kay, a white Scottish couple. She grew up in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow. Her adoptive parents were politically active: her father worked full-time for the Communist Party and stood for Parliament, while her mother was the Scottish secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Kay experienced racism from children and teachers at school. These circumstances are important context for her writing, but they are not a simple explanation for it: her work gives different people and perspectives room to speak.

Kay initially considered acting. After the Scottish artist and writer Alasdair Gray read her poetry and encouraged her to write, she concentrated on literature. She studied English at the University of Stirling. That route into writing, alongside her experience of adoption and growing up as a Black child in Scotland, forms part of the background to her early poetry, which asks how personal histories meet wider ideas of identity and belonging.

Three voices in The Adoption Papers

Published in 1991, The Adoption Papers was Kay’s first book of poetry. Its multiple voices are those of an adopted biracial child, her adoptive mother and her biological mother. Rather than presenting adoption through one account, the collection lets the three women’s perspectives meet and diverge. Identity, race, nationality, gender and sexuality all enter that structure, making the form itself central to the book’s exploration of family and belonging.

The collection won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1992. Kay’s subsequent poetry collection Other Lovers (1993) received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994. Her work also moved decisively into fiction. Trumpet (1998), inspired by the life of the American jazz musician Billy Tipton, a transgender man, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. The novel’s recognition reflects Kay’s ability to take questions of identity into a different literary form, rather than confining them to autobiographical poetry.

Writing across forms and lives

Kay has written for the stage, screen and children as well as for adult readers. Her play Twice Over became the first play by a Black writer to be produced by the Gay Sweatshop Theatre Group in 1988. In The Lamplighter, she explored the Atlantic slave trade. The work was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2007 during a season marking the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act 1807, and appeared in print as a poem in 2008. These works place her writing in theatrical and historical contexts as well as in the more familiar space of the poetry collection.

Her 1997 biography of blues singer Bessie Smith extended that range. In Red Dust Road, she turned to her own search for her biological parents. Published as an autobiographical journey in 2011, the book traces the lives and meeting of her parents, whose paths crossed when her father was a student at Aberdeen University and her mother was a nurse. A stage adaptation by Tanika Gupta premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2019, in a production by the National Theatre of Scotland and HOME. The movement from memoir to stage underlines how Kay’s writing continues to travel between forms.

Her poetry collections include Off Colour (1998), Life Mask (2005), Darling: New & Selected Poems (2007), Fiere (2011), Bantam (2017) and May Day (2024). She has also published novels, short stories and books for children. These different bodies of work share an interest in whose experiences are represented and how a story changes when told from another point of view. Kay has described herself publicly as lesbian; sexuality, like race and family, is among the subjects her work addresses.

Scotland’s Makar and a wider literary role

Kay was appointed Scotland’s Makar in 2016, succeeding Liz Lochhead. She held the post until 2021, when Kathleen Jamie succeeded her. The role made her the national poet of Scotland, bringing her into a public position associated with the country’s cultural life. Her poetry had already ranged across questions of identity and belonging; as Makar, she represented Scottish poetry in a national capacity.

Her honours include the MBE, awarded in 2006 for services to literature, and the CBE, awarded for the same service in 2020. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016. The National Library of Scotland announced in 2024 that it had acquired her literary archive. Kay has also served as Chancellor of the University of Salford, from 2015 to 2022, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Cultural Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Why Jackie Kay deserves a place in British Legacy

Kay’s place in British literary history rests on work that gives formal shape to questions often treated as private or difficult to voice. In The Adoption Papers, three distinct perspectives make adoption a shared story without collapsing the differences between an adopted child and two mothers. The collection’s recognition with the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1992 marked an early achievement; the later Somerset Maugham and Guardian Fiction prizes show the reach of her work beyond that first book. Trumpet, The Lamplighter and Red Dust Road demonstrate how she has carried questions of identity, history and family into fiction, drama and memoir.

Her contribution also has a specifically Scottish public dimension. As Makar from 2016 to 2021, Kay held a national literary office, while her teaching and university roles connect her work to readers and writers beyond her own books. The National Library of Scotland’s acquisition of her archive preserves her papers as part of the country’s literary record. Taken together, her writing, honours, public service and continuing place in literary institutions make her legacy more than a list of awards: they show how a Scottish writer has expanded the forms through which stories of race, adoption, sexuality and belonging can be told.

Sources

Jackie Kay — Wikipedia, revision 1379331246

Adapted in part from Jackie Kay by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.