Exclusive:“There’s poetry everywhere you look” - Jackie Kay celebrates 35 years of writing with her new anthology

It’s an experience that can be enjoyed at this year’s London St Andrew’s Book Festival in November when she appears at the Poetry Showcase with fellow Scottish poets Len Pennie and Hannah Lavery, chaired by Fiona Lindsay, or at her Edinburgh international poetry festival, Push the Boat Out (PTBO) event today.

“It'll be fun to be on with Hannah and Len,” she says. “Hannah’s a great playwright as well as a poet. I like all of her work and particularly the play Lament for Sheku Bayoh because it said something very, very important.
And Len’s done amazing things with language. I like her podcast as well as her poetry because she brings people back to the original meanings of old Scots words and has done a great service in re-enlivening the language.”

It’s also a chance for Kay to catch up with fans of her poems, novels and memoir, covering themes such as heritage, adoption, race, identity, sexuality, from 1991’s prize-winning The Adoption Papers through 1998’s Trumpet to 2010’s Red Dust Road and May Day in 2024. Selected Poems traces her life, the ups and downs, from encounters with her Scottish and Nigerian birth parents to the deaths of her adoptive parents, and everything in between, overflowing with voices and accents, snatches of song and Scots, her writing replete with humour, empathy and humanity.

“At events readers tell you extraordinary stories about their lives and how your work matters to them and that's very validating. And it's really lovely to be in that environment with other book loving people so that’ll be fun.”

Poems are the stock in trade for the former Makar (National Poet for Scotland), Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Salford, MBE and CBE, who has already published three poetry collections along with the Guardian Fiction Prize-winning novel Trumpet, three collections of short stories, a memoir, a children’s book with another due out shortly, and is currently writing a new work. So it’s no surprise she’s a great believer in the power of poetry.

“So many people are writing, reading and listening to poetry now. There are podcasts, it’s on the Underground, on buses, in museums, in films, in music. There’s poetry everywhere you look.

“The good thing about poetry is it has many guises, many tongues - it's literally multilingual - and can have many faces. And it has actual uses. It's as useful as a table. Or a meal. It’s nutritious. It’s medicinal, can be healing. If I think of all the purposes of poetry off the top of my head, I could go on for an hour. And they're not fanciful. They're actually true.

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“Poetry can be great comfort, a solace, can spur you to action, be inspiring, be motivational. It can be all sorts of things. It can be said round the table in a toast, like the Selkirk Grace, or about a piece of food, like To A Haggis. Or it can be a love poem that allows you to describe exactly how you feel for somebody else and put into words your own feelings. And it can be political too.”

Sold. It’s hard to resist Kay anyway, with her warm voice and coral-lipped smile, her discs of orange resin earrings dancing on the collar of a brown and orange striped shirt as throws her head back and laughs as she talks. She’s good fun, as the audience at this year’s event that saw her in conversation with Douglas Stuart would attest, the pair delighting in various Scottish and/or dirty words such as ‘rantallion’, along with erudition and insight into their writing.

Which poems do people mention to her most?

“Darling probably comes up the most. People say they read it at their mum's or dad's funeral, and A Lang Promise, a love poem, they often tell me they read that at their wedding. And Fiere, about a long friendship, people have bought for friends of 60, 70 years, and it's their poem, often two of them will be clutching copies of the book.

“Then there'll be a lot of political poems mentioned, like George Square or In My Country, where other black people people say they often get asked where they're from so that poem means a lot.

“And kids study my poems at school, in Scotland in particular, so they'll say they loved Keeping Orchids, or Gap Year gets mentioned.

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For the recent Jimmy Reid Memorial Lecture in Glasgow Kay picked political poems about shipbuilding, miners and protest such as The Shoes of Dead Comrades [Kay noticed her father wore shoes gifted by the widows of late fellow socialist campaigners], Paul Robeson, A Life in Protest and George Square.

“Next year I'm the Angela Davis professor at Frankfurt University and students are particularly interested in gender and race, so I'll pick out poems that go with that. And Black River, I stayed up till 3am writing that the night before a literary festival in Jamaica. I thought what’s going to make people feel like they're part of me and I'm part of them?”

“So a bunch of them. Enough for the poems not to get totally jealous of each other,” she laughs. “Selected Poems is a bit like a Lucky Bag. You can dip in, open it at any page.”

Did she recognise a repetition of themes or encounter surprises, pulling them all together?

“Yes. Seamus Heaney talked about having a territory, a wee plot of land that you keep on digging and as long as you find something new or something extra to grow, then you're OK as a writer. I kind of rotate the crops.

“I'm interested in identity, nature and nurture and what makes us who we are. In the fluidity of race and gender and how identities should be given room to move and we shouldn't be boxed up.

“We are all more multiple than people suspect and have at least one imaginary other life we could have lived if we'd made different decisions or had this or that not happened. That's probably the journey I find most interesting, the journey of that imaginary self, and how she's grown up and changed as the work's gone on.”

Another Jackie Kay is an intriguing thought, and one that took off with a commission for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival that saw her write Doppelganger, a story about her imaginary identical twin.

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“It’s funny because everybody kind of believed this was true until the end, and even then they were googling to see if she was real. But it was just playing around with the idea of having an actual identical twin. And the twin in the story didn't identify as black or mixed race. She said, ‘we’re one race, the human race’, and was a chief inspector in the police - and a Tory!” Kay laughs in delight at this notion.

“She was great fun to play around with, to think ‘if you were to meet somebody exactly like you, what would be really shocking?’

“I often think what would I be like if I'd been brought up in Nigeria or in the Highlands or with very religious people, because my birth mother was a Mormon and my birth father was a born again Christian?
What would my life have been like if I'd been brought up in an orphanage or brought up with Tories? There's any number of different versions of the self.”

Kay wasn’t brought up in Nigeria, the Highlands, as a Christian or by Tories. She was brought up by socialists John and Helen Kay in Bishopbriggs after they adopted her as a baby in 1961, (the daughter of a Scottish nurse from the Highlands and a Nigerian student at Aberdeen University) and they are a lingering, loving presence in her poems before and after their death, along with other family - her son Matt, now 38 and a film-maker, scales her bookcase as a child, and friends and lovers.

Does she think her adoptive parents were ideal for her, being activists who campaigned against inequality and injustice?

“Yeah, I think if they'd been in a forest of trees and I had to pick out two as my parents, it would be those two. I wrote a poem recently called Sweet Chestnut 1862, and it's exactly about that. I’ll read it to you, if I can find it,” she says, leafing the pages of Selected Poems.

Why Sweet Chestnut? I ask as she searches.

“Because there's one near where I live and it’s 300 years old, and you had to pick a year in its life to write about.” Finding it, she begins:

“Sweet Chestnut 1862.

A century before I was born, sweet chestnut, the tree was me and I was a tree, famous for our mahogany seeds. My family gathered under the tree’s benevolence, though they were not yet relations, the trees, and moved to other cities, to Glasgow, to Dundee. Before they knew me, a century before I was born, they were my family tree.
Not blood, not bone, not DNA, but of the beech family. Their roots took hold of me, that mysterious ancestry, alchemy, Without the goodness of the tree I am nobody.

“So the answer to your question is a poem.” She laughs.

“They were the perfect parents for me, but you can see why I had to read you that poem because it feels a better answer. That thing where sometimes the poem will speak for you.

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“And it's the opposite of the family tree people trace on ancestry sites. I thought I'd write a family tree for an adopted person where you're sharing a kind of mysterious alchemy, a sense of being almost fated to be together. My mum used to say: “We chose you. Other people had to take what they got.”

What is it about poetry that it can express something other forms or mediums can’t, especially in times of joy or sadness?

“Poetry is the beat of the heart in these situations,” she says. “It captures your exact mood and it's distinct enough to carry around in your head. You can learn a poem off by heart. People treasure poems in the most important moments of their life, when they're getting married or at a funeral.

“In these moments it’s a poem that accompanies people and that tells you that poetry is the language of being human. It tells us how we're feeling. It holds up a mirror to our very soul at times when we're not afraid to be deep. We will have a poem as our companion, because we're able to say my own words won’t do it for me today. I need a poem.”

Kay knows what she’s talking about having lost her parents and brother, as well as her birth father all within a short space of time.

But as she wrote in Trumpet, the novel inspired by the life of jazz musician Billy Tipton, whose biological sex as female was revealed only after their death, “Loss isn't an absence after all, it’s a presence.”

“Yes,” she says. “When Trumpet came out I got a letter from a man in Ireland who said his wife had died over five years before and since then he'd been trying to find a description of grief and what it felt like and this matched it. It was really touching that a complete stranger had finally found it in that.

“I've just come back from Glasgow yesterday,” she says, “and I find it quite a hard city to be in because they're everywhere you look. And they're also nowhere you look, simultaneously,” meaning her parents.

“That business of people being just around the corner, just about to meet you at the platform of the train station and also really strongly not there. It's a rug from under your feet that grief gives you all the time. But then the surprise is when the rug goes back under your feet and something comforts you.

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“It's a bit of a roller coaster, grief. But there is more solace and more comfort to be found than I thought there would be in some places, in some ways. And I have their voices in my head, my mum and dad and brother and take them with me about the place. I can be hauling my heavy case onto a train and hear my mum's voice going, ‘I don't know how you do it,’ or going, ‘pack it all in, Jackie. Pack it all in!’ - she giggles - “because she didn't get that writers don't retire. We just keep on going.”

Listening to her adopting her mother’s voice, you see why in her youth Kay considered acting, with classes at the then RSAMD in Glasgow before writer and artist Alasdair Gray saw some of her poems and encouraged her to write and she went on to study English at Stirling University.

Kay is already busy with her next book, but likes to keep its contents vague.

“I'm always writing the next book. Hopefully that'll be out in another year's time, but I don't want to pin myself down describing it too much. I just published my first illustrated children's book, Coorie Doon, the year before last and I’ve got another coming out called The Quail and the Peacock. And I'm doing a children's poetry collection as well. Then I'm writing another memoir-type book.”

Kay balances her writing with teaching, her favourite part of which is the students.

“I really, really like students and their ways of thinking about things, and just keeping in touch with the ways people are feeling.

“It's quite extraordinary, this particular period, because this is the age of anxiety and a lot of the students have really high anxiety problems. And all sorts of things you have to try and overcome before you can start to teach them. I've noticed that change over the years. We live in this time of multiple pressures for young people with social media and how to be, and all this vitriol, hostility and hatred. It’s a very difficult time for this post-COVID generation to navigate. So I like my students. I like the challenge of them and what they bring to the table.”

Turning 65 next month, Kay is upbeat about the future, returning to one of her heroes, Angela Davis.

“I really admire Angela Davis who is now in her 80s and talks about young people in a really inspiring way. She says that's the generation that gives her hope and she would never, ever lose hope.

“I think hope's the most important thing we have to hang on to, because if we lose hope, we lose everything. If we lose hope, we lose the dream of a better society.”

Jackie Kay is appearing at the London St Andrew's Book Festival 2026 in a special Poetry Showcase with Len Pennie and Hannah Lavery, chaired by Fiona Lindsay, on Friday, November 20, 2026, 6.30–7.30pm, St Columba's Church (Sanctuary), Knightsbridge, Pont Street, London, SW1X 0BD, Tickets via TicketSource, £12.65

Selected Poems 1991 - 2026, Jackie Kay, published by Picador, paperback/eBook; £14.99

An Evening with Jackie Kay in partnership with The Fingal, Saturday 31 October, 6.45pm-8:30pm Fingal Ship Hotel, Push the Boat Out (PTBO), Edinburgh’s international poetry festival, 12-15 November, events from 29 October.