(Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl's adoption by ...)
Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl's adoption by a white Scottish couple- from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter.
(Bessie Smith was certainly the greatest blues singer who ...)
Bessie Smith was certainly the greatest blues singer who lived and probably one of the greatest and most influential singers of the twentieth century. Her blues songs mirrored her tempestuous life as she travelled across America performing and making records, taking both male and female lovers, achieving great wealth and stardom until her eventual decline during the years of the depression. She died in a car crash in 1937 aged 43.
Ethnicity:
Jackie Kay was born to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father.
Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961. She was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow, in a 1950s-built housing estate in a small Wimpey house, which her adoptive parents had bought new in 1957. They adopted Jackie in 1961 having already adopted her brother, Maxwell, about two years earlier. Jackie and Maxwell also have siblings who were brought up by their biological parents.
Education
Jacqueline received her B.A. (honors; English) at University of Stirling in 1983.
Career
On April 1978, Jacqueline had an accident which ended her carrier as a runner, and she said that it made her a writer (Orlando). She has then moved to London where she worked at a series of menial jobs while focusing on her literary career. Nowadays she lives in Manchester and she is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
Achievements
She is famous for her books The Adoption Papers, That Distance Apart, and Other Lovers.
Because Jacqueline was a lesbian, Fred D’Aguiar (an Afro-Caribbean British writer) asked her one day if she wanted to be a mother. She said yes but she wanted it by “the normal way” as she said. Thus in 1988 she gave birth to her son Matthew, who studied at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and he is now a film maker in London. Jackie doesn’t have any more children, although she wanted more but she didn’t want another man in the family or any donors.
Jackie Kay has met Carol Ann Duffy in 1991 and lived together in Manchester in 1996 with Kay’s son and Duffy’s daughter (Ella). In 2010 Jackie was in a relationship with Denise Else, who is a sound technician at the BBC (Orlando). However because she is really reserved about her private life it quite impossible to know if they are still together at the time.
