Jackie Kay | |
---|---|
Makar | |
In office 15 March 2016 –14 March 2021 | |
Preceded by | Liz Lochhead |
Succeeded by | Kathleen Jamie |
Personal details | |
Born | Jacqueline Margaret Kay 9 November 1961 Edinburgh,Scotland |
Alma mater | University of Stirling |
Occupation | Professor of creative writing at Newcastle University |
Known for | Poet and novelist Makar,2016–2021 |
Awards | Somerset Maugham Award (1994);Guardian Fiction Prize (1998);Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award (2011) |
Jacqueline Margaret Kay, CBE , FRSE , FRSL (born 9 November 1961),is a Scottish poet,playwright,and novelist,known for her works Other Lovers (1993),Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). [1] [2] Kay has won many awards,including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994,the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. [3] [4]
From 2016 to 2021,Jackie Kay was the Makar,the poet laureate of Scotland. [5] [6] She was Chancellor of the University of Salford between 2015 and 2022. [7]
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 and Maxwell also have siblings who were brought up by their biological parents. [9]
Her adoptive father worked for the Communist Party full-time and stood for Member of Parliament, [8] and her adoptive mother was the Scottish secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As a child,Kay suffered racism from children and teachers at school. [10] John Kay died in 2019 at the age of 94. [11]
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]
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. [12] 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 Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1992. [13] It is a multiply 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. [14]
In 1997,Kay published a biography of blues singer Bessie Smith;it was reissued in 2021. [15] An abridged version read by the author featured as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in the last week of February 2021. [16]
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), [17] 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, [18] [19] [20] and was published in printed form as a poem in 2008. [21]
In 2010 Kay published Red Dust Road,an account of her search for her biological parents,who had met each other when her father was a student at Aberdeen University and her mother was a nurse. The book was adapted for the stage by Tanika Gupta and premiered in August 2019 at the Edinburgh International Festival in a production by National Theatre of Scotland and HOME,at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. [22] Comparisons have been drawn between this work and Looking for Transwonderland by Noo-Saro-Wiwa. [23]
She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, [24] and Cultural Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University. Kay lives in Manchester. She took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books ,her piece being based on the book of Esther from the King James Bible. [25] In October 2014,it was announced that she had been appointed as the Chancellor of the University of Salford,and that she would be the university's "Writer in Residence" from 1 January 2015. [26]
In March 2016,Kay was announced as the next Scots Makar (national poet of Scotland),succeeding Liz Lochhead,whose tenure ended in January 2016. [27] [28]
She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2006 Birthday Honours for services to literature,and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours,again for services to literature. [29] [30] Kay was on the list of the BBC's 100 Women announced on 23 November 2020. [31]
Kay is a lesbian. [32] [33] 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. [34] [35] During this relationship,Duffy had a daughter,Ella,whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson. [35] [36]
External videos | |
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Jackie Kay,vimeo format [37] |
Jackie Kay.(memoir)
Some other poetry used in GCSE Edexcel Syllabus
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Helen Dunmore FRSL was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Jo Shapcott FRSL is an English poet, editor and lecturer who has won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award.
Liz Lochhead Hon FRSE is a Scottish poet, playwright, translator and broadcaster. Between 2011 and 2016 she was the Makar, or National Poet of Scotland, and served as Poet Laureate for Glasgow between 2005 and 2011.
Caitríona O'Reilly is an Irish poet and critic.
Kathleen Jamie FRSL is a Scottish poet and essayist. In 2021 she became Scotland's fourth Makar.
Grace Nichols FRSL is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977, before which she worked as a teacher and journalist in Guyana. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In December 2021, she was announced as winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Imtiaz Dharker is a Pakistan-born British poet, artist, and video film maker. She won the Queen's Gold Medal for her English poetry and was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University from January 2020.
Stewart Conn is a Scottish poet and playwright, born in Hillhead, Glasgow. His father was a minister at Kelvinside Church but the family moved to Kilmarnock, Ayrshire in 1941 when he was five. During the 1960s and 1970s, he worked for the BBC at their offices off Queen Margaret Drive and moved to Edinburgh in 1977, where until 1992 he was based as BBC Scotland's head of radio drama. He was Edinburgh's first makar or poet laureate in 2002–05.
John Agard FRSL is a Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was awarded BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award in November 2021.
Julia Copus FRSL is a British poet, biographer and children's writer.
Tishani Doshi FRSL is an Indian poet, journalist and dancer based in Chennai. In 2006 she won the Forward Prize for her debut poetry book Countries of the Body. Her poetry book A God at the Door has been shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize under best poetry collection category. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
Fiona Ruth Sampson, is a British poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing. A former musician, Sampson has written on the links between music and poetry, and her work has been set to music by several composers. She has received several prizes for her literary biographies and poetry. Notably, Sampson received a MBE for services to literature in 2017.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Kate Clanchy MBE is a British poet, freelance writer and teacher.
Warsan Shire is a British writer, poet, editor and teacher, who was born to Somali parents in Kenya. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize, chosen from a shortlist of six candidates out of a total 655 entries. Her words "No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark", from the poem "Conversations about Home ", have been called "a rallying call for refugees and their advocates".
Claire Askew is a Scottish novelist and poet.
Darling: New & Selected Poems is a poetry book by Jackie Kay. It was first published by Bloodaxe Books on 27 October 2007. Gap Year, Keeping Orchids, Lucozade, My Grandmother's Houses, Old Tongue, and Whilst Leila Sleeps are all National 5 Scottish texts.
The Adoption Papers is the debut poetry collection by the Scottish poet Jackie Kay. It was published in 1991 by Bloodaxe Books. It won the Forward Prize for best first collection.