Jackie Kay

The images shown above represent the Glasgow International 2024 project that Jackie Kay is participating in, not the poet’s individual practice.

Jackie Kay (CBE, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist. She was born in Edinburgh, in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University where she read English. She is known for her works Other Lovers, Trumpet and Red Dust Road 1993, amongst others. She 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. From 2016 to 2021, Kay was the Makar, the poet laureate of Scotland. She was Chancellor of the University of Salford between 2015 and 2022.

Her new collection May Day casts an eye over several decades of political activism, from the international solidarity of the Glasgow of Kay’s childhood, accompanying her parents’ Socialist campaigns, through the feminist, LGBT+ and anti-racist movements of the 80s and 90s, up to the present day when a global pandemic intersects with the urgency of Black Lives Matter.