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 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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Carol Ann Duffy
Scottish poet Jackie Kay acknowledges CAD 's help and encouragement in her poetry collection The Adoption Papers, 1991.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. Carol Ann Duffy. Northcote House.
17
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...
Family and Intimate relationships Carol Ann Duffy
CAD met the Scottish poet Jackie Kay , with whom she began a long-term relationship.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. Carol Ann Duffy. Northcote House.
17
Dedications Carol Ann Duffy
CAD published The World's Wife, a poetry volume (dedicated to May and Jackie and Ella with love) which had been in prospect since 1994.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Anthologization Liz Lochhead
As well as reading her poetry at festivals and other venues, LL has selected and edited for Mslexia magazine in early 2004 a number of stories and poems on the theme of ice.
Lochhead, Liz. “Ice”. Mslexia, Vol.
20
, pp. 26-7.
26ff
Her...
Anthologization Grace Nichols
GN 's poetry has appeared in a number of further anthologies. These include Six Women Poets (1992), edited by Judith Kinsman , which has an introduction by GN . Penguin Modern Poets Volume 8 (1996)...

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.