Showing results by author "Jackie Kay" in All Categories

Read by the author, Jackie Kay. A deeply moving and searching enquiry into all forms of human friendship, Fiere is a brilliant collection of poems by Jackie Kay, as well as a lyric counterpart to her memoir, Red Dust Road: the extraordinary story of the search for her Nigerian and Highland...

This poetry collection is beautifully and skilfully read by the author, renowned poet Jackie Kay. May Day is the long-awaited new collection from one of our best-loved poets and former Makar of Scotland, Jackie Kay. As the title suggests, these poems cast an eye over several decades of political...

From one of our best-loved poets and former Makar of Scotland, Red Dust Road is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny. From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of...

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive. The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man...

Jackie Kay’s first collection as Scottish Makar is a book about the fighting spirit – one, the poet argues, that we need now more than ever. Bantam brings three generations into sharp focus – Kay’s own, her father’s, and his own father’s – to show us how the body holds its own...

In Jackie Kay’s first collection of stories, ordinary lives are transformed by secrets. Her world might seem familiar – sex, death and family cast long shadows – but the roles of mothers, daughters and lovers are imagined and revealed in the most surprising of ways. Jackie Kay sees the...

This is a book about memories, love, sex and the power of the imagination to see us through the most difficult times. The women of Reality, Reality are mesmerising, whether in love or in solitude. Jackie Kay’s newest and most luminous of collections is full of compassion, generosity, sorrow...

Tales of passion and jealousy, lust and romance from the award-winning author of Red Dust Road This fierce, funny and compassionate collection explores every facet of that most overwhelming and complicated of human emotions: love. With winning directness, Jackie Kay captures her characters’...

Bessie Smith was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star. Smith's life was notoriously difficult. As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.

A beautiful genre-bending tribute to the larger-than-life blues singer Bessie Smith. Scotland’s National Poet blends poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction to create an entirely unique biography of the Empress of the Blues. There has never been anyone else like Bessie Smith. Born in...