Jackie Kay
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2016
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the poet and writer Jackie Kay. Born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, she was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. Her father worked for the Communist Party and her mother was the Scottish secretary for CND. She began to write seriously at the age of 17 when recovering from a moped accident, and while reading English at the University of Stirling she became a feminist and politically active in the arena of gay and lesbian rights and racial equality.
Her first book of poetry, the partly autobiographical The Adoption Papers, was published in 1991 and won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award. She won the 1994 Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers, the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet and in 2010 published Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her biological parents. She is now Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and Chancellor of Salford University and was appointed Makar - Scotland's Poet Laureate - in March 2016.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. |
| 0:05.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Highland Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:09.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:14.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co. |
| 0:19.0 | UK slash Radio 4. My castaway this week is the writer Jackie Kaye, professor of creative writing at Newcastle |
| 0:42.0 | and chancellor of Salford University, this spring she also became |
| 0:45.9 | Scotland's Macke or Poet Laureate. |
| 0:48.9 | If the page is another place to take difficult things, then it's no wonder she's so productive. Her life from its very |
| 0:54.8 | beginnings has given her plenty to draw on. Brought up in a Glasgow suburb in a home full of |
| 0:59.8 | love and words and ideas, she nonetheless understood the notion of difference from a very young age. Her mom and dad are white. She isn't. |
| 1:08.0 | For a time in her teenage years she says she was simply an angry young black lesbian who lost her sense of |
| 1:15.1 | humor. Lucky for all of us she got it back. Much of the power in her work comes from |
| 1:19.9 | writing about heavyweight subjects with a deft likeness of touch. She says poetry is important |
| 1:26.5 | because it manages to say in words things you can't otherwise say. It manages to express people's |
| 1:32.1 | love, people's grief, people's loss. Poetry gives voice to the |
| 1:36.6 | voiceless. So welcome Jackie Kay. You talk there about love and grief and loss and I wonder why it is you think |
| 1:44.7 | that we as people turn to the words of strangers at the most difficult times in |
| 1:49.9 | our life the most vigorous times in our life. |
| 1:54.0 | I think when we have really difficult things happen to us, we are literally lost for words often, |
| 2:00.0 | and we look for somebody else to have the words to put in for us and as soon as we hear those words we recognize them |
| 2:07.8 | They hold up a mirror to the experience and we say that's it that's it exactly and we feel a kind of a gratitude and we feel beyond |
... |
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