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. 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. Her adoptive father worked for the Communist Party full-time and stood for Member of Parliament, and her adoptive mother was the Scottish secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As a child she suffered racism from children and teachers at school. 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. In August 2007, Jackie Kay was the subject of the fourth episode of the BBC Radio 4 series The House I Grew Up In, in which she talked about her childhood. John Kay died in 2019 at the age of 93. Initially harbouring ambitions to be 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. 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. 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 awards include the 1994 Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers, and the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, inspired by the life of American jazz musicianBilly Tipton, born Dorothy Tipton, who lived as a man for the last fifty years of his life. Kay writes extensively for stage, 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 and published in poem form in 2008. In 2010 she 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. Kay was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2006 Birthday Honours. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, 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. 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. In March 2016, it was announced that Kay would be taking up the position of Scots Makar, succeeding Liz Lochhead, whose tenure ended in January 2016. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2006 for services to literature, and Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2020 New Year Honours, again for services to literature.
Personal life
Kay is a lesbian. In her twenties she gave birth to a son, Matthew and later she had a 15-year relationship with poet Carol Ann Duffy. During this relationship, Duffy gave birth to a daughter, Ella, whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson.
