School of English & Digital Humanities

Jackie Kay

Wednesday 8th March, 6.30pm

Dora Allman Room, The Hub, UCC.

You are cordially invited to a reading & conversation with esteemed, inimitable Scottish poet Jackie Kay. Jackie Kay (b. 1961) is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays, whose subtle investigation into the complexities of identity have been informed by her own life. Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, she was adopted as a baby by a white couple. Kay’s awareness of her different heritages inspired her first book of poetry, The Adoption Papers, which dramatises her experience through the creation of three contrasting narrators: an adoptive mother, a birth mother and a daughter. The book was a great success, winning the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and a commendation from the Forward Poetry Prize judges. Subsequent collections and her celebrated first novel, Trumpet, have continued to explore issues of cultural and sexual identity as well as the intimacies and upheavals of love. Kay has also written poetry for children and her first children’s novel, Strawgirl, was published in 2002. She currently lives in Manchester.