ABSTRACT
Poet, playwright and novelist Jackie Kay was born in 1961, in Edinburgh,
Scotland. Her mother was Scottish and her father Nigerian. She was
adopted by a white couple and brought up in Glasgow. Having studied at
the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University,
where she read English, she later moved to London and eventually to
Manchester. The experience of being adopted by and growing up within a
white family inspired her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers
(1991). The poems deal with an adopted child’s search for a cultural
identity and are told through three different voices: an adoptive mother, a
birth mother and a daughter. The collection won a Scottish Arts Council
Book Award and a commendation by the Forward Poetry Prize judges in
1992. The poems in her second collection, Other Lovers (1993), explore
the role and power of language, inspired and influenced by the history of
Afro-Caribbean people, the story of a search for identity grounded in the
experience of slavery. The collection includes a sequence of poems about
the blues singer Bessie Smith.
