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.
In Memoriam