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Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh. She is a poet, novelist and writer of short stories and has enjoyed great acclaim for her work for both adults and children. Her novel Trumpet won the Guardian Fiction Prize and is a modern classic. She has published two collections of stories with Picador, Why Don't You Stop Talking and Wish I Was Here. She teaches at Newcastle University, and lives in Manchester.
This captivating collection comprises intensely poignant profiles of people and places; of domestic life and wild landscapes, especially Scotland’s “dark and stormy waters”, with flashes of crimson running through the poems in the form of fire, a fox, red shoes, a red balloon. Among the cast of memorable characters is Mrs Dungeon Brae, terrifying in both life and death, and The Knitter, who “knits to keep death away” and urgently recounts big life occasions knitting has accompanied her through, all the while “casting on, casting off”. Then there’s the grandmother lamenting the fact that “it’s no like the past for grannies these days...nobody knows how to make a conversation/ let alone make a home-made meal or a fresh baked scone.” Brimming with humanity - with love, anger, frustration and flashes of humour - this engaging, accessible anthology makes a richly rewarding gift for language lovers of all ages.
The women of Reality, Reality are mesmerizing, whether in love or in solitude. Full of compassion, generosity, sorrow and joy, their fifteen unforgettable stories explore the power of the imagination to make things real, and celebrate, most of all, those who dare to dream.
A 2013 World Book Night selection. Shortlisted for the Galaxy Biography of the Year Award 2011. Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 17 March 2011. This charmingly written autobiography - about a young girl with a Nigerian father adopted by a wonderfully humane white Scottish couple - could have been a dark, complicated to read. But it isn't. There is clarity, warmth and a twinkle in the eye. A sense of someone who is comfortable in her own skin as she comes to terms with the meaning of love and her own sexuality. Thoughtful, tender, gentle and humane, Red Dust Road is a delight to read. I find Jackie Kay's writing compelling and so evocative. I was gripped by this memoir of her journey to find out where she came from and to forge a connection with her birth parents. Fiona Gibson, from our Best Autobiographies Ever Blog.
A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer. Scotland's National Poet Jackie Kay brings to life the tempestuous story of the greatest blues singer who ever lived. 'A wonderful writer on a magnificent singer.' ROBERT WYATT 'The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read.' IAN CARR, BBC MUSIC 'Biographies don't usually bring the subject to life again. This one did. I finished the book then started it again immediately.' PEGGY SEEGER 'What a life! What gulpable storytelling! Exactly the kind of writing about music we need: personal, ardent, playfully confrontational, questioning, undogmatic. A love song to a complicated idol' KATE MOLLESON 'Pure joy: one trailblazing woman pays tribute to another. Jackie Kay finds the music in the short, dazzling, capricious life of Bessie Smith'HELEN LEWIS 'A passionate, personal, imaginative insight into Bessie's art.' DAILY MAIL *** BESSIE SMITH was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star. Smith's life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of 'bathtub gin', got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a cohort of the Ku Klux Klan. As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.
'Ambitious, defiant, angry and gripping . . . the bitter story of slavery through the experience of four women' Guardian 'Jackie Kay's work, formally expansive and inclusive . . . is always about the opening up of our notions of identity' Ali Smith, author of How to Be Both In The Lamplighter award-winning poet and Scottish Makar Jackie Kay takes us on a journey into the dark heart of Britain's legacy in the slave trade. First produced as a play, on the page it reads as a profound and tragic multi-layered poem. We watch as four women and one man tell the story of their lives through slavery, from the fort, to the slave ship, through the middle passage, following life on the plantations, charting the growth of the British city and the industrial revolution. Constance has witnessed the sale of her own child; Mary has been beaten to an inch of her life; Black Harriot has been forced to sell her body; and our lead, the Lamplighter, was sold twice into slavery from the ports in Bristol. Their different voices sing together in a rousing chorus that speaks to the experiences of all those brutalised by slavery, and lifts in the end to a soaring and powerful conclusion. Stirring, impassioned and deeply affecting, The Lamplighter remains as essential today as the day it was first performed. This is an essential work by one of our most beloved writers.
Jackie Kay's first collection as Scottish Makar is a book about the fighting spirit - one, the poet argues, that we need now more than ever. Bantam brings three generations into sharp focus - Kay's own, her father's, and his own father's - to show us how the body holds its own story. Kay shows how old injuries can emerge years later; how we bear and absorb the loss of friends; how we celebrate and welcome new life; and how we how we embody our times, whether we want to or not. Bantam crosses borders, from Rannoch Moor to the Somme, from Brexit to Bronte country. Who are we? Who might we want to be? These are poems that sing of what connects us, and lament what divides us; poems that send daylight into the dark that threatens to overwhelm us - and could not be more necessary to the times in which we live.
Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny. With an introduction by the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon. From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay's journey in Red Dust Road is one of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In a book remarkable for its warmth and candour, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that what triumphs, ultimately, is love. 'Like the best memoirs, this one is written with novelistic and poetic flair. Red Dust Road is a fantastic, probing and heart-warming read' - Independent
Jackie Kay's first collection as Scottish Makar is a book about the fighting spirit - one, the poet argues, that we need now more than ever. Bantam brings three generations into sharp focus - Kay's own, her father's, and his own father's - to show us how the body holds its own story. Kay shows how old injuries can emerge years later; how we bear and absorb the loss of friends; how we celebrate and welcome new life; and how we how we embody our times, whether we want to or not. Bantam crosses borders, from Rannoch Moor to the Somme, from Brexit to Bronte country. Who are we? Who might we want to be? These are poems that sing of what connects us, and lament what divides us; poems that send daylight into the dark that threatens to overwhelm us - and could not be more necessary to the times in which we live.
With an introduction by Ali Smith. When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive. The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love. It is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart.
From Aberdeen to the Isle of Wight, Out of Bounds is a newly charted map of Britain as viewed by its black and Asian poets. It takes the reader on a riveting, sensory journey through Scotland, England and Wales, showing the whole country from a fresh perspective. This extensive and ground-breaking anthology - with its sudden forks in the road, and its roads not taken - stops off in the Highlands and Islands, skirts the North East coast from Whitley Bay to the sands of Bridlington, wanders lonely through the Lake District and Yorkshire, climbs the mountains of Wales before descending to the Black Country and Southern England. Along the way it takes in lochs and landmarks from Glasgow's George Square and the Angel of the North to the London Eye and the Long Man of Wilmington. If alienation, unbelonging and dislocation remain key aspects of black and Asian experiences in Britain, what such terms simultaneously conceal are the rich and manifold attachments to place, region, city and landscape offered in Out of Bounds. The poems question the idea of an easy or singular identity, nimbly dealing with the triple bind of ethnic, geographical and poetic belonging. An alternative A to Z of the nation, a new poetic guide, the book enables us to look again at the UK's local and regional landscapes and the poets who pass through them. Out of Bounds is a definitive anthology that brings together new and established black and Asian writers and places them firmly on the map of what is great and not so great about Britain. Includes: Shanta Acharya, John Agard, Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, James Berry, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Vahni Capildeo, Merle Collins, Fred D'Aguiar, David Dabydeen, Imtiaz Dharker, Bernardine Evaristo, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Tariq Latif, Sheree Mack, Jack Mapanje, E.A. Markham, Daljit Nagra, Grace Nichols, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Michelle Scally-Clarke, Seni Seneviratne, John Siddique, Lemn Sissay, Dorothea Smartt, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Benjamin Zephaniah, and many others.
'A stunner. I am heartbroken to have finished it' Ali Smith In Jackie Kay's first collection of stories, ordinary lives are transformed by secrets. Her world might seem familiar - sex, death and family cast long shadows - but the roles of mothers, daughters and lovers are imagined and revealed in the most surprising of ways. Sometimes it is the things that we choose to hide within ourselves which can transform us - and that has never been more true than in Jackie Kay's warm, exuberant storytelling. She sees the extraordinary in everyday life, and lights it up with humour and generosity in a way that is uniquely her own. 'If stories like these can still be written, the short story form must still be alive, not to say kicking' Irish Times
'Kay gives hugely of her talent; pours it onto the page . . . These stories charm, move and entertain' Guardian This fierce, funny and compassionate collection explores every facet of that most overwhelming and complicated of human emotions: love. With winning directness, Jackie Kay captures her characters' greatest joy and greatest vulnerability, exposing the moments of tenderness, of shock, of bravery and stupidity that accompany the search for love, the discovery of love and, most of all, love's loss. 'Jackie Kay's characters sing from the page' Daily Telegraph 'At the heart of it is a faith in stories themselves: a belief that the most desolate history can be lent coherence if you tell it right' TLS 'Kay's humour and optimism are transcendent' Sunday Herald
Obsessed with a certain TV cookery show, a woman embarks on her own whisky-fuelled culinary adventure.Fast Fiction: A selection of masterful short stories from 4th Estate short story collections, and the best talent from The Sunday Times authors, available to purchase as single story ebooks.
Jackie Kay's new collection is a lyric counterpart to her memoir, Red Dust Road, the extraordinary story of the search for her Nigerian and Highland birth-parents; but it is also a moving book in its own right, and a deep enquiry into all forms of human friendship. Fiere - Scots for 'companion, friend, equal' - is a vivid description of the many paths our lives take, and of how those journeys are made meaningful by our companions on the road: lovers, friends, parents, children, mentors - as well as all the remarkable and chance acquaintances we would not otherwise have made. Written with Kay's trademark wit and flair, and infused with both Scots and Igbo speech, it is also a fascinating account of the formation of a self-identity - and the discovery of a tongue that best honours it. Musical and moving, funny and profound, Fiere is Jackie Kay's most accomplished, assured and ambitious collection of poems to date.
Humour, Gender, Sexuality, Sensuality, Identity, Racism, and Cultural Difference. When do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay's part of the equation. Darling brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, The Adoption Papers , Other Lovers , Off Colour and Life Mask , as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers. Kay's poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. The title of her acclaimed short story collection, Why Don't You Stop Talking , could be a comment on her own poems, their urgency of voice and their recognition of the urgency in all voice, particularly the need to be heard, to have voice. And what voice - the voices of the everyday, the voices of jazz, the voices of this many-voiced United Kingdom.
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