Jackie Kay was born and brought up in Scotland. She has published five collections of poetry for adults, all published by Bloodaxe – The Adoption Papers (winner of a Forward Prize, a Saltire Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award), Other Lovers (which won the Somerset Maugham Award), Off Colour, shortlisted for the 1999 TS Eliot Award, Life Mask (2005) and Darling: New and Selected Poems (2007).

Her first novel, Trumpet (Picador, 1998), won the Guardian Fiction Prize, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and The Authors' Club First Novel Award. She has written for the stage and television and worked with composer Mark Anthony Turnage. A collection of short stories, Why Don't You Stop Talking, was published in 2002. Red, Cherry Red (Bloomsbury, 2007) was awarded the CLPE Poetry Award in July 2008. Her latest book is The Lamplighter (Bloodaxe, 2008).

Jackie Kay is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and teaches creative writing at Newcastle University. She lives in Manchester.

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Books I love

An old favourite
The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde - but it's very difficult to pick out one favourite amongst all. I'm very attached to Ariel by Sylvia Plath and to Elegies by Douglas Dunn and to anything by Edwin Morgan and to Memo for Spring by Liz Lochhead.'

A new favourite
'A new favourite is Apology for Absence by Julia Darling. But there are a lot of writers that I really like with new or newish books out, Don Paterson's Landing Light, Kathleen Jamie, Colette Bryce, Matthew Hollis, Amanda Dalton and Nick Drake.'

A current interest
'I'm currently obsessed with cooking books because I've just moved house and find cooking very relaxing. I'm also really obsessed with people who have extreme religious views - how they shape and change and threaten the world. And with masks, all different kinds of masks (african masks, life masks, death masks, face masks, masters of disguise...) which I have been writing about in my new book Life Mask.'

Jackie Kay, February 2004

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Featured poem

Baggage

Dark, the days when the ships came slowly in,
Carrying the baggage from the old past,
Old love letters, promises long since past.

Icy cold it was that winter morning,
Thick fog blurred the ship mast
The ship humped in like a hurt already cast.

You had to go and pick it up. You pushed in,
Signed the slip for your wicker chest,
And trudged the roads and miles back west,

Carrying your past on your back, late morning,
Like an animal carries what it needs to its den.
The old loch at your side, lapping: Ye ken

This – it is not as heavy it might be.
You step to your small house in the new light.

Jackie Kay © 2005
from Life Mask (Bloodaxe 2005)