Jackie Kay

Standard Name: Kay, Jackie
Birth Name: Jacqueline Margaret Kay
Nickname: Jackie
JK 's poetry, plays, and fiction explore issues of divided, displaced, or mixed identity. Her writings probe and challenge assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality with a mixture of pain and humour. She often draws her inspiration from jazz and blues musicians, particularly Bessie Smith and Billy Tipton . JK has also written a memoir about her search for her birth parents, and several children's books, as well as works for radio drama and performance poetry), opera, and audiocassette.
Photo of Jackie Kay taken during the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival. She is wearing brown tinted glasses and a dress with small polka-squares that matches her earrings. she has short black hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Ruth Padel
Her election was marred by unpleasantness. Another of the three short-listed candidates, Caribbean poet Derek Walcott , withdrew from the competition after a letter-writing campaign brought to the attention of potential voters the fact that...
Textual Production Winsome Pinnock
The National Theatre (Cottesloe) put on an arresting play for young people by WP entitled Can You Keep a Secret?, part of the New Connections season of plays for the young.
Launched a couple...
Literary responses Ali Smith
Jackie Kay included Girl Meets Boy in her list of favourite books from 2007. In comparing Smith's version of Iphis and Ianthe with Fleur Adcock 's contribution to Hofmann and Lasdun 's After Ovid: New...
Literary responses Ali Smith
Reviews of Autumn were overwhelmingly positive and generally quite taken with the timeliness of its subject-matter. Joanna Kavenna called it a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities, while Laura Miller observed that...
Textual Features Ali Smith
This volume, themed around eruptions of conflict between lovers, features short-story selections from Jhumpa Lahiri , Jackie Kay , D. H. Lawrence , Katherine Mansfield , Dorothy Parker , and Grace Paley (as in the...
Friends, Associates Ali Smith
Kasia Boddy , an academic collaborator with Smith and Wood, features quite prominently in the introduction to Smith's short-story collection The First Person—fittingly, given her academic specialization in the short story. AS also numbers...
Textual Production Ali Smith
In August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival , three months before publication, AS stated her concern for the future of the public library system itself. As a narrative thread, she collected personal oral library...
Textual Features Ali Smith
Among the novel's most remarkable scenes is the moment of sexual intercourse between Robin and Anthea. In what Jackie Kay has called the best sex I've read in years, Smith avoids the basic corporeality of...
Textual Production Jeanette Winterson
Her contributors included Ali Smith on Beethoven 's Fidelio, Anne Enright on Dvorak 's Rusalka, Jackie Kay on Janacek 's The Makropulos Case, Joanna Trollope on Donizetti 's L'Elisir d'Amore, Kate Atkinson

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Kay, Jackie, and Shirley Tourret. Two’s Company. Blackie, 1992.
Kay, Jackie. Why Don’t You Stop Talking. Picador, 2002.
Sulter, Maud. “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues”. Charting the Journey, edited by Shabnam Grewal et al., Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1988, pp. 100-10.
Kay, Jackie. “Wish I was here”. Guardian Weekly, pp. 50-3.
Kay, Jackie. Wish I Was Here. Picador, 2006.