Darling

Jackie Kay was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. In 2007 Bloodaxe published Darling: New & Selected Poems, which included almost all of her four previous books of poetry from Bloodaxe, The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998) and Life Mask (2005). Her epic poem The Lamplighter, adapted for both radio and stage, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008, was followed by Fiere (Picador, 2011), The Empathetic Store (Mariscat Press, 2015) and Bantam (Picador, 2017). Jackie Kay's fiction and non-fiction (from Picador) has been massively popular: her novel Trumpet (1998), three collections of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking? (2002), Wish I Was Here (2006) and Reality, Reality (2012), and her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), which won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. She won the Somerset Maugham Award with Other Lovers, the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, Decibel Writer of the Year for Wish I Was Here and has twice won the Signal Poetry Award for her children’s poetry. Her fourth book of poetry for children, Red Cherry, Red, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. The Adoption Papers is a set text on numerous school and university courses. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and co-edited the anthologies Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2012) with James Procter and Gemma Robinson, and The Mighty Stream: Poems in celebration of Martin Luther King (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2017) with Carolyn Forché. In 2014 she was appointed Chancellor of the University of Salford, and in 2016 she was named as the new Makar, National Poet of Scotland. She lives in Manchester, and has been awarded an MBE and an OBE for services to literature.

'Kay's Darling locates her alongside Ted Hughes - even T.S. Eliot - in that elite group whose children's writing, rather than gainsaying their primary poetic project, informs and enriches it - One of Kay's greatest strengths is the way she locates individual experience in the collective. As befits an adoptive daughter of peace marchers, Kay is a writer for whom the personal is indeed political - Even such a public poet as Kay, though, writes verse shaped above all by human cadence. She has an immaculate ear for speech patterns, using accent and dialect, in particular, to lift and characterise' - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 'Darling is proof of her place as one of the most deft, most airy, most unencumbered, most fearless and most humane of poets. It culminates in a set of poems whose rhetorical ease and lack of pretension are like a clear starry sky on a good frosty night' - Ali Smith, The Guardian (Books of the Year)