The award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist Jackie Kay is among the 12 Scottish poets honored in Edinburgh Park with commemorative busts. Jacqueline Margaret Kay was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father in 1961. As a baby, she was adopted by a white couple and grew up in Bishopbriggs. Her adoptive parents were political activists, and she often joined them in demonstrations against poverty and apartheid. Her early aspiration was to become an actor, so she studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama before transferring to Stirling University to major in English and pursue a writing career. In 1991, at 30, she published her first poetry collection, The Adoption Papers, for which she won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her second poetry book, Other Lovers, was published in 1993, and five years later, she published her first novel, Trumpet, which earned her the Guardian Fiction Prize. In many of her writing, Kay deals with autobiographical subjects such as race, identity, nationality, sexuality, and gender. By 2022, she had published over 20 poem collections, novels, short stories, and plays, won more than 15 awards, and served as the Makar, the poet laureate of Scotland from 2016 to 2021, Scotland’s first black national poet. Michael Snowden sculptured the Jackie Kay bust in 2004 as part of a series of 12 portrait busts of Scottish poets. Modeling for the sculptor inspired her 2005 poem collection Life Mask, in which she discusses love, loss, and secret identities. Other poets honored in this series are Liz Lochhead, Douglas Dunn, Naomi Mitchison, and W.S. Graham. Read more...