Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay – born in Edinburgh in 1961 – is a Scottish poet, novelist and also the author of short story collections. Life

== Life ==

Born to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Kay is of mixed ethnicity. Right after birth, she was adopted by a white communist Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay. As a child, she was fascinated by stories like Anne Of Green Gables or the Famous Five, which gave her the opportunity to dive into another world and into other people’s lives. Later, she realised that writing allowed her to create her own world and to escape from the predominantly white Glasgow where she grew up. At the age of 12, she finished her first story called One Person, Two Names, which circles around a black American girl who pretended to be white. Her early works already showed that identity plays an important role and is still today one of the key topics in her writings. She connects “identity” not only with African origins or the fact being adopted, but also sexuality is important in this case. As a teenage girl, she discovered being attracted by women and not by men, which was a shock to her mother. After school she studied at The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and received an Honours Degree in English from the University of Stirling in 1983. Then, she moved to London (and after that to Manchester) because she never felt accepted as a black person in Glasgow: “There is a funny thing when people accept you and don’t accept you. I love the country, but I don’t know if the country loves me.” (cited in: Brooks). Before working as a full-time writer, she gained money as a cleaner and hospital porter. Kay had a long-time relationship with Carol Ann Duffy, with whom she and her son Matthew lived together. Since the separation, she has been living alone in Chorlton, south Manchester. She works as a professor at Newcastle University, where she teaches “creative writing”.

== Career: Works and Prizes ==

Kay published her first collection of poetry – The Adoption Papers – in 1991. Those poems are about a black girl’s adoption by a white Scottish couple. She won several prizes for her first work: a Scottish Arts, Council Book Award, a Saltire First Book of the Year Award and a Forward Prize. Other Lovers – her second collection of poems, which deal with the sick body, the sick mind, the sick society, the sickness of racism and prejudice – received a Somerset Maugham Award in 1994. Furthermore, she wrote, for instance, Off Colour in 1998, her debut novel Trumpet in 1998 (Guardian Fiction Prize, 1998; Authors’ Club First Novel Award, 2000; shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2000) and short story collection like Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002) or Reality, Reality (2012).

== Bibliography ==

British Council Literature. 8 June 2012. < http://literature.britishcouncil.org/jackie-kay>. Brooks, Libby. “Don’t Tell Me Who I Am”. The Guardian. 19 January 2002. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jan/12/fiction.features>. Kay, Jackie. Off Colour. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1998. Kay, Jackie/Merle Collins/Grace Nichols. Jackie Kay, Merle Collins, Grace Nichols: Penguin Modern Poets. Vol. 8. London: Penguin, 1996. Newcastle University. School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics. 11 June 2012. <http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/people/profile/jackie.kay#tab_publications>. Rustin, Susan. “A Life in Writing: Jackie Kay”. The Guardian. 27 April 2012. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/27/life-writing-jackie-kay>.