Jackie Kay

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS You think adoption is a story which has an end. But the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending. From the moment when, as a little girl, she realises that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing...

Selected Poems 1991–2026 by Jackie Kay collects together a body of work that is nothing short of exceptional. From The Adoption Papers, winner of the very first Forward Prize thirty-five years ago, to May Day, published in 2024 to widespread acclaim, Jackie has for decades written so eloquently about love and the grief which is its obverse. The poems collated...

'The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read' - Ian Carr, BBC Music '[Bessie Smith] showed me the air and taught me how to fill it ... she's the reason I started singing, really' - Janis Joplin Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer. Bessie Smith was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she...