Jackie Kay was a Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright who was named Makar, the national poet of Scotland, in 2016, becoming the first woman and first Black person to hold the position and whose work, spanning more than three decades of literary production, engaged with subjects including race, identity, adoption, gender, sexuality, and the complexity of Scottish and Black British identity in ways that made her one of the most important and distinctive literary voices of her generation. She died in 2026 at an advanced age.
She was born Jackie Kay on 9 November 1961 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, and was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple in Glasgow, an experience that became central to much of her literary work and that she explored most directly in her memoir The Adoption Papers, published in 1991, which traced the experience of adoption from three perspectives, including those of the birth mother, the adoptive mother, and the child, in a formal innovation that gave the work its distinctive structure and emotional power.
Her poetry collections, beginning with The Adoption Papers and continuing through Off Colour, Other Lovers, Darling, Life Mask, and Fiere, among others, developed a body of lyric work distinguished by its directness of emotional engagement, its wit and playfulness alongside its emotional seriousness, and its engagement with the specific textures of Scottish working-class life, Black British experience, and the personal dimensions of relationships, loss, and identity that define her thematic range. Her poetry found large audiences for a literary form that often struggles to reach beyond specialist readers, demonstrating that poetry in the right hands can speak to the human experiences that everyone recognises while maintaining the formal ambition and linguistic precision that the art requires.
Her fiction, including the novel Trumpet, published in 1998 and winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, explored the life of a Black Scottish jazz musician whose death reveals to his widow and son that he was born female, a story that engaged with questions of identity, authenticity, and the complex relationship between public and private selves with the empathy and narrative skill that characterises her best work. Trumpet drew comparison to jazz music in its narrative structure and its exploration of improvisation and transformation as central human strategies, and it has been recognised as one of the significant Scottish novels of its generation.
Her appointment as Scottish Makar in 2016, the national poet position whose responsibilities include writing poetry for significant national occasions and whose cultural visibility gives the holder a platform for the advocacy of poetry and literature in Scottish public life, was both a personal honour and a cultural statement about the Scotland whose national poet she represented. That Scotland chose a Black Scottish woman as its national poet in 2016 reflected the country’s understanding of its own identity as more diverse and complex than older national narratives had acknowledged, and her holding of the position gave that expanded sense of Scottish identity an artistic embodiment.
She received the MBE, the DCL from the University of Oxford, and honorary degrees from multiple Scottish universities, among many other recognitions of a career that had contributed substantially to Scottish and British literature. She died in 2026.