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Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow.[8] They adopted Jackie in 1961, having already adopted her brother, Maxwell, about two years earlier. Jackie also has siblings who were brought up by her biological parents.[9]
As a teenager she worked as a cleaner, working for David Cornwell—who wrote under the pen-name John le Carré—for four months. She recommended cleaning work to aspiring writers, saying: "It's great ... You're listening to everything. You can be a spy, but nobody thinks you're taking anything in." Cornwell and Kay met again in 2019; he remembered her and had been following her.[10]
In August 2007, Kay was featured in the fourth episode of the BBC Radio 4 series The House I Grew Up In, in which she talked about her childhood.[2]
Career
Initially thinking of being an actor, she decided to concentrate on writing after Alasdair Gray, a Scottish artist and writer, read her poetry and told her that writing was what she should be doing.[13] She studied English at the University of Stirling and her first book of poetry, the partially autobiographical, The Adoption Papers, was published in 1991 and won the Saltire SocietyScottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1992.[14] It is a multiple voiced collection of poetry that deals with identity, race, nationality, gender, and sexuality from the perspectives of three women: an adopted biracial child, her adoptive mother, and her biological mother. Her other prizes include the 1994 Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers, and the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, inspired by the life of American jazz musician Billy Tipton, a transgender man.[15]
In 1997, Kay published a biography of blues singer Bessie Smith; it was reissued in 2021.[16] An abridged version read by the author featured as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in the last week of February 2021.[17]
Kay writes extensively for stage (in 1988 her play Twice Over was the first by a Black writer to be produced by Gay Sweatshop Theatre Group),[18] screen and for children. Her drama The Lamplighter is an exploration of the Atlantic slave trade. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March 2007, produced by Pam Fraser Solomon, during a season marking the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act 1807,[19][20][21] and was published in printed form as a poem in 2008.[22]
In March 2016, Kay was announced as the next Scots Makar (national poet of Scotland), succeeding Liz Lochhead, whose tenure ended in January 2016.[28][29]
Kay is a lesbian.[34][35] In her twenties she gave birth to a son, Matthew (whose father is the writer Fred D'Aguiar), and later she had a 15-year relationship with poet Carol Ann Duffy.[36][37] During this relationship, Duffy had a daughter, Ella, whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson.[37][38]
^Ponsonby, Bernard (14 November 2019). "Obituary: John Kay, Communist stalwart". Herald Scotland. Herald and Times Group. Newsquest Media Group. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
Jackie Kay, vimeo format[39]
