by Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961. A black child adopted by white working-class socialist parents, she was brought up in Glasgow. The experience of transracial adoption has informed Kay’s work from “The Adoption Papers” to her recent prize-winning novel, Trumpet (1998). In addition to poetry and fiction, Kay has also written for television and for theater. Chiaroscuro, presented in 1986, was the result of a fruitful collaboration between the Theatre of Black Women, which commissioned her to write the piece (and who eventually performed it), and the Gay Sweatshop theater. The Adoption Papers, Kay’s first published collection of poetry, won an Eric Gregory Award (1991), together with the Saltire and Forward prizes (1991) and for her second collection of poems, Other Lovers, she garnered a Somerset Maugham Award (1993). More success followed, this time in fiction, with Kay’s winning The Guardian...