Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Kay, Jackie, 1961-, poet and novelist, MBE
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1961-
History
Jackie Kay was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. In 2007 Bloodaxe published Darling: New & Selected Poems, which included almost all of her four previous books of poetry from Bloodaxe, The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998) and Life Mask (2005). Her epic poem The Lamplighter, adapted for both radio and stage, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008, was followed by Fiere from Picador in 2011.
Jackie Kay's fiction and non-fiction (from Picador) has been massively popular: her novel Trumpet (1998), two collections of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking? (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006), and her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), which won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. She won the Somerset Maugham Award with Other Lovers, the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, Decibel Writer of the Year for Wish I Was Here and has twice won the Signal Poetry Award for her children’s poetry. Her fourth book of poetry for children, Red Cherry, Red, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. The Adoption Papers is a set text on numerous school and university courses. She lives in Manchester, and was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2006.
She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and co-edited the anthology Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2012) with James Procter and Gemma Robinson.