Three voices share the title sequence of Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers: a birth mother, an adoptive mother and a daughter. Published in 1991, the collection made space for several people’s experiences within a single family story. That willingness to listen from more than one position runs through Kay’s poetry, fiction and memoir. Again and again, belonging emerges through relationships, language and the stories people tell about one another.1
Finding a voice in Scotland
Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, and adopted by Helen and John Kay. She grew up in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow, in a politically active household. Her education included English at the University of Stirling, from which she graduated in 1983. Hearing poets such as Liz Lochhead and Tom Leonard helped her recognise the possibilities of writing in a voice rooted in the speech around her. Scottish language and experience could provide the material and sound of poetry.2
The Adoption Papers developed that interest in voice through a structure that gives different speakers room to be heard. Conversation, shifts of tone and rhythmic energy make the family relationship something a reader encounters in language. The collection also addresses sexuality and working-class Scottish life. Its range prevents adoption from becoming an isolated theme, detached from the other circumstances through which people understand themselves.1
Family, memory and the journey
Kay returned to family history in the memoir Red Dust Road. Where the earlier poetry builds a sequence of speaking voices, the memoir follows her search for her birth parents across Scotland and Nigeria. Its scope includes the people who raised her as well as the people from whom she inherited her ancestry. The journey asks how these connections can exist together. Parents, siblings, friends, places and cultural memories all have a part in the account; tracing biological relations becomes one element of a much larger exploration of family.3
A musician remembered
Her 1998 novel Trumpet approaches identity through the death of the fictional jazz musician Joss Moody. His widow Millie, his adopted son Colman and other people who knew him offer different ways of remembering his life. Public attention bears down on the family, and the involvement of a tabloid journalist adds another pressure to grief.4
The novel’s changing perspectives make the act of describing another person central to the reading experience. Intimacy and public curiosity produce different kinds of account. A life held in somebody’s memory can be reshaped into a story intended for an audience. That tension gives Kay’s interest in voice a dramatic urgency.4
Poetry in public places
Kay served as Scotland’s Makar, or national poet, from 2016 to 2021. The post took her writing into settings far beyond a bookshop or poetry reading. She read Threshold at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 2016; her lullaby Welcome Wee One was included in Scotland’s Baby Boxes after the scheme began in 2017. During lockdown she helped bring poets and musicians to audiences digitally.5
These projects placed poetry alongside civic ceremony, family life and public communication. Looking back on the role, Kay described travelling through cities, the Highlands and islands, meeting people and discovering more of the country. The Makar’s work made listening and encounter part of a national appointment, extending the relationship between poet and audience into daily life.5
Care, grief and ordinary speech
May Day, published in 2024, carries family, friendship and politics into a later collection. In the poem ‘Mother’s Day, 2022’, the familiar act of sending a card becomes a way to address someone who has died. ‘Daughters, Neighbours’ places shared grief within a friendship. The poems use recognisable actions and conversational movement to approach feelings that can be difficult to state directly. Scots language, humour and the textures of everyday care remain part of their expressive range.6
In a conversation with the interviewer Ramona Koval, Kay explained that poems could help people express grief with a concision other forms lacked. She also spoke about writing for children as readers capable of complicated thought and feeling. Her interest in very young and very old people offered different ways of observing time, habits and change. Across those ages, the writer’s task begins with paying attention: to what people say, what they notice, and how the world looks from where they stand.7
Sources and further reading
1. The Adoption Papers — Bloodaxe Books.
2. Jackie Kay — Scottish Poetry Library.
3. Red Dust Road — Pan Macmillan.
4. Trumpet — Penguin Random House.
5. Celebrating Scotland’s Makar — Scottish Government.
6. May Day: four poems — Jackie Kay, Books from Scotland.
7. Jackie Kay: interview transcript — Ramona Koval.
Featured image. Jackie Kay at her installation as Chancellor of the University of Salford, 29 April 2015. Photograph: Nick Harrison / University of Salford Press Office, via Wikimedia Commons; source-provided crop. Image record · CC BY 2.0
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