C.J. Griffin and Amrita Shenoy

Working across the page, stage, and airwaves, Jackie Kay is one of the most accomplished writers in Britain today. In this interview, held on 13 September 2023, C.J. Griffin (CG) and Amrita Shenoy (AS) ask questions ranging across the different literary forms and themes that have animated Kay’s oeuvre over the last thirty years. In response, Kay reflects on the craft of writing and her career as it has unfolded alongside rapid technological, social, and political change in Britain and beyond.

CG: During a short film you made with the Scottish Book Trust, you said that you ‘write in order to ask questions, not to answer them’. What are the questions you are asking when you write? Have they changed over time?

Jackie Kay: Every book brings its own set of dilemmas and questions, really. In Trumpet, I was interested in the basis of identity — particularly gender identity and how the act of love could transcend concerns or worries about identity. In other words, if you love somebody enough, you believe them. In May Day,I was interested in protest. Protest from throughout my life and in grief, including whether grief is a form of protest.

In The Adoption Papers, I was drawn to ideas of nature and nurture and which of them is stronger in asserting people’s personalities and identities. I suppose the loose theme of a lot of my books is identity and the voice — how the voice works and whether the voice is character and can be plot.  

Seamus Heaney once said that every writer has their own plot, their own wee patch of ground they keep digging. It doesn’t matter if the patch of ground is quite small as long as, each time, you find something surprising. My little patches are identity, voice and character and I keep trying to explore these themes from different angles.

CG: In art and life there is a sense of there being a ‘real’ truth and, equally, a ‘fictional truth’ – something you yourself have acknowledged. What does ‘fictional truth’ mean for you? Do you think its distinction from ‘real’ truth is becoming harder to maintain?

JK: Well, I think there are two kinds of fictional truth that currently operate in our world. There’s one I call a pure version of the fictional truth where your imagination gets to something closer to the truth than ‘the truth’. When I, say, created my character Mohammad Nassar Sharif, the registrar in Trumpet, I didn’t interview lots of registrars for the research. He was loosely based on a fleeting moment from when I was registering the birth of my son. Everything else about him was fictitious. Yet, he seemed closer to the truth than if I had to try to recreate somebody from reality.

Whereas Sophie Stones in Trumpet is a character we see often in our society. We have craven, wanton, corrupt, lawless journalists who make things up for their living and distress people. Because she was too close to that truth, I couldn’t breathe imaginative truth into her. And so, she’s the least successful character in the book. For a fictional character to work, it is necessary that something else breathes in them.

There’s another kind of fictional truth that exists in our society.  We live in times where reality is challenged and threatened all the time, and where people fictionalise themselves through different social media outlets as the line dividing their real life and their imaginative life is very, very thin indeed. Nobody can tell who the real person is anymore. So, we have a big challenge now, with the question of the truth of a self. And it has a different answer than I would have given ten or fifteen years ago.

AS: Some of your works, such as The Adoption Papers (1991) and Life Mask (2005), have often invited autobiographical readings. However, in terms of literary appreciation, might this limit a text’s autonomy to the scope of the author’s life? How separate can the art be from the artist?

JK:  When I first wrote The Adoption Papers, I didn’t expect it to be paid the attention it got. Neither did the publisher. 

I think people saw it as a personal story. I appreciate the idea that I write from my own experience but my own experience intersects with those of other people’s. My hope is that a reader will read my works and identify with them however they like. In fact, people do often identify with my writing, and write to me to share how they’ve engaged with my writing.

I think people saw it as a personal story. I appreciate the idea that I write from my own experience but my own experience intersects with those of other people’s. My hope is that a reader will read my works and identify with them however they like. In fact, people do often identify with my writing, and write to me to share how they’ve engaged with my writing.

As to the question of whether it limits a work to just read it autobiographically, I think it does, yes. If we read Sylvia Plath’s poems, for instance — not that I’m comparing myself to her, I’m just talking about a writer who gets read very autobiographically — then sometimes, we can put onto the work itself, things that we know from the life [of the author]. And we don’t then give the writer the freedom or the license to be completely imaginative. An awful lot of writers through time have been hampered by this very dilemma. For Anne Sexton, she was affected by how often her work was read as a cipher for her personal experiences. I think I managed to swerve this problem of seeing myself as representative — since, I don’t even really see that my work, once I’ve written it, is completely me anymore.

AS: Writers of colour in Britain have often discussed a literary ‘ghettoisation’ in the global literary scene, a typecasting of marginalised writers as political voices. In your view, what could readers and scholars of literature do differently to circumvent this problem?

JK: One thing they could do is regard the text itself and not make assumptions or necessarily connect one writer to the other. There are writers that exist in the same space and time, like the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s exciting when you read their works together. Yet, connections between writers’ works happen almost by a process of osmosis or modes we can’t easily, sociologically, explain. But since black writers have been marginalised for so long, literary critics have now got [to find] a way of looking at their works. Sometimes they then lump such writers together and perpetuate a ‘ghettoisation’. I tend to elude such groups because I am a Scottish black writer who writes in a voice different from that of the stereotype for the black writer. Yet, it’s equally problematic if there’s no way of grouping and identifying people because this will also lead to their invisibility.

I would put black writers in parts of the bookshops or in groups where they could easily be found. But I would also advise on doubling up and having them everywhere in the rest of the shop.

CG: Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds is a digital archive of Black and Asian British contemporary writing. How have Britain and Britishness figured in your own writing about Scotland and Scottishness?

JK: Seemingly, Scotland sees itself as a victim of an English colonialism — which it has been, definitely. But it is also true that Scotland’s own benefits from the British Empire haven’t been discussed enough. In The Lamplighter, I wrote about how British cities profited from money from the slave trade. One of the cities that the book covers in detail is Glasgow — a city that would hardly have invited attention for its connections with the slave trade. People knew about the tobacco lords but they didn’t read more into names such as ‘Virginia Street’ or ‘Jamaica Bridge’. Similarly, in the popular imagination, a plantation owner is never wearing a kilt. We need to grow up as a country. It’s taken Britain, generally anyway, an awfully long time to acknowledge racism in its institutions. There are examples of institutionalised racism even in leftfield things.

AS: Interestingly, ‘Makar’ translates to ’maker’. In this sense, the poet laureate and, by extension, the writer, is a maker of fictive worlds. In your time as Makar, which fictive worlds did you feel most compelled to make and share?

JK:  I like how democratic the term ‘Makar’ is. It comes from the old word ’to make things’, used in the fifteenth century to describe bards. This was not exclusively Scottish, at first. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer, too, was referred to as a Makar. It’s the opposite of the word ‘laureate’, which implies monarchs, kings, queens and laurels. Rather, Makar suggests that poetry can be practical — essential as well as elegiac. For example, when I read about the ‘Baby Box of Essential Things’ project, I wrote to the Scottish Government to ask if a poem could be included as an essential thing. To my surprise, they said ‘yes’. That’s something that is important to me; that poetry can have its uses.

I also read the poem ‘Threshold’ for the opening of the Scottish Parliament. I wanted it to be a multi-voiced poem in many different languages to show Scotland as a place of welcome. Because, in that year, 2016, Scotland had voted very differently on Brexit than England and Wales, with 62% of the Scottish population wanting to stay in Europe. So being Scots Makar was a thrilling job to have and, also, to be able to go around Scotland, to the tiny Hebridean islands and see how those places have changed. For instance, I was in North Uist, near Hebrides, and I was surprised that there was a huge lesbian turnout for me.  It gave me a sense of how the country was changing; from rural Scotland, down to round all the islands and the mainland, and urban Scotland. And it was great to try and reflect that in my writing.

AS:  The ‘many-voicedness’ you discuss can be seen across your works. As you mentioned, a recent example of this is ’Threshold’ which invites Scotland’s diverse ethno-linguistic identities to unite in the same ‘living room’. What is it about multiplicity that you think enables such powerful expression?

JK: The refrain of ‘Threshold’ is ’it takes many tongues to tell a story’. I believe that. The world — particularly the Western world — is very ethnocentric. It promotes certain global languages, overlooking other languages that people speak. People cannot be excluded on such bases and locked out of experiences. Particularly in Scotland, there are more languages spoken than people automatically think of. For instance, Italian Scots and Chinese Scots have been there for years. I then wanted to have as many languages as were actually spoken in Scotland to make the poem multiple. Because, we are obsessed with singular truths in our society, but I believe the truth is multiple. And the closer we get to multiple voices telling their stories, the better society will be.

CG: Across many different genres and forms, your writing often returns to secrets and secrecy. And this interest in secrets is frequently connected with music. The most obvious examples are Trumpet (1998) and Bessie Smith (1997). What interests you as a writer about secrecy? Are secrecy and music connected?

JK: I am fascinated by secrets. We are all are fascinated by secrets, as human beings. It’s interesting to ask which things people will easily talk about and which they’ll be silent about.

Sometimes, silence is as creative or as palpable as noise. I am interested in secrets because, like music, they’re all to do with time. So, I guess secrets and music connect through time. Secrets are time bombs waiting to go off. Why we are perhaps thrilled by them, sometimes in a salacious way, is because we know that sooner or later, the secret will come out. Even if it is after somebody has died, the secret, eventually, does come out. It’s very rare for a secret to even last a lifetime and for anyone to get away with it, completely. So, there’s a kind of discovery in that, which is fascinating.

There’s something very fictive about secrets. That’s why we have so many expressions around secrecy, like ‘the truth is stranger than fiction’. The truth usually involves secrets and in being ‘stranger’ than fiction, the truth is usually a secret truth…

AS: You once movingly said that a poem is a “little moment of belief”. Often however, writers find it difficult to make their moments of belief last, what with rejections from big-ticket publishers and literary prizes that construct notions of the ‘best’ writer. Having navigated the writing industry for more than three decades, which insights are worth sharing with emerging writers?

JK: The advice differs depending on the writing people produce. My advice for young poets would be to read their poetry out loud, to themselves or to friends. To send their poetry to magazines, from Poetry Review to Magma. To enter young poets’ competitions like Foyle Young Poets of the Year. To try and get on Arvon Creating Writing courses and to enter the Poetry Business Award, which publishes a pamphlet of poems first, since it’s difficult to get a collection of poems published without having published first of all. And the pamphlet is enjoying a new renaissance. It’s wonderful how many outlets there are for beautifully, artistically well-produced pamphlets, from Full Candlestick to Lighthouse, and others. There’s even an award for the best pamphlet — the Michael Marks Poetry Award.

If it was a young novelist, I would tell them to join a writers’ group or form one of their own. Because it’s useful to have feedback. The novel is a long and lonely trudge. The little moment of belief with regard to the poem is easy enough to sustain for the length of a poem but much more difficult to sustain for the length of a novel. And writers are Jekyll and Hyde creatures, in a way, because we have to believe in ourselves but we also have to doubt ourselves in equal measure.

So, it’s important to tell young writers to believe in themselves but also to have enough healthy self-criticism; to be able to kill off your darlings, as they say. And to know that editing is, really, the secret of the universe — it’s not so much what you write first of all, it’s how you rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again. And not to be afraid of failure and of bad reviews. To be completely and utterly yourself. To take risks, because writing is a risk-taking business. And sometimes that can feel quite scary. Writing is as psychological a game as football. You know you can get a penalty when nobody’s looking and, then, when everyone’s looking, you suddenly can’t get a penalty!

Every time you get to write a new poem, you must discover something fresh and the challenge of that is terrifying! So, after three decades, I know that there are terrors, but I also know that there are things that we can do about them.

Cite this: Griffin, & Shenoy, Amrita. “On Being a Writer: An Interview with Jackie Kay (2024).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/on-being-a-writer-interview-jackie-kay. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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Eliza McCarthy

The British Library’s 2024 exhibition, Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music (26 April to 26 August) mapped the coordinates of a vast and ever-evolving audible history over a clockwise journey through the exhibition space. Three hundred exhibits explore the radical potential of Black British music to draw communities together and included pieces ranging from the letters of writer and composer Ignatius Sancho to Trinidadian steel drums, carnival costumes, sound systems and original installation pieces.

Images from the Beyond the Bassline exhibition, 2024 (Photos: Eliza McCarthy)

The exhibition culminated in iwoyi, an immersive five-channel piece commissioned by the British Library and created by Tayo Rapoport and Rohan Ayinde in collaboration with Touching Bass. Rapoport is a London-based producer, artist, and film director, and Ayinde an artist and poet whose work traverses literary, audio, and video forms in its embrace of performance and installation. The South London Touching Base is a curatorial music and movement platform. Played at varying speeds across the walls and ceilings of two conjoined rooms, the piece offered an Afro-surrealist expressive journey into how sound and silence are entangled within Black life. We were invited to sit awhile on the benches or the cushions on the floor, and lean into the sensory opacity as sound lagged behind movement, and movement became fractured across the surfaces of the two conjoined rooms.

Rohan Ayinde & Tayo Rapoport’s Iwoyi, 2024 (Embed from Nowness)

Iwoyi strikes at the heart of the exhibition’s exploration into sound as a multisensory experience—a notion that was encapsulated by the poet Linton Kwesi Johnston’s 1980 album, Bass Culture that in many ways inspired the exhibition. The vinyl sleeve sits in a softly-lit glass in the middle of the displays and Johnson himself is famed for his experiments with audio frequencies below 40Hz, existing right on the boundaries of the human auditory realm. At this level, sound becomes tactile, radically unintelligible perhaps but felt as a physical sensation within the listener’s body. In Bass Culture, we are invited to consider sound beyond the realm of the aural, a notion that is played out on a larger scale in iwoyi.

At the heart of these two examples is the distinct ways in which sound is rendered at once highly material, tactile, and visible, contradicting its otherwise fundamental ephemerality. Whilst sound is translated into a physical sensation in Bass Culture, the aural similarly becomes entwined with the other senses in iwoyi. In the curatorial space that is mapped within Beyond the Bassline, sound continued to evolve. As we looked through the glass case at LKJ’s vinyl sleeve, we heard Fela Kuti meeting Shirley Bassey, and encountered the tinny sounds from headphones we had yet to use. And these sounds in turn crossed with the continual, surrounding-thrum of an ambient ocean scape in the contemporary short film, Of Us, about migrant identities in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay.

Bass Culture offered visitors a sound palimpsest that became continually re-contextualised within an ever-expanding soundscape and invited the possibility of a reparative future shaped within and around music.

Cite this: McCarthy, Eliza. “Exhibition Report – Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/exhibition-report-beyond-the-bassline-500-years-of-black-british-music/. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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‘Jackie Kay: An International Conference’ was hosted online, 3 June 2021, and convened by Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Dr Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores University). The conference and subsequent edited collection are part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series; it was sponsored by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Cite this: Griffin, C. J. “On Neoliberal Society: The Aesthetic of the Secret in the Fiction of Jackie Kay.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-griffin-kay-neoliberal-society-secret. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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‘Jackie Kay: An International Conference’ was hosted online, 3 June 2021, and convened by Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Dr Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores University). The conference and subsequent edited collection are part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series; it was sponsored by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Cite this: García-Soriano, Ana. “Liminality and Intimacy in Jackie Kay’s Wish I Was Here (2006).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-garcia-soriano-kay-liminality-intimacy. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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‘Jackie Kay: An International Conference’ was hosted online, 3 June 2021, and convened by Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Dr Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores University). The conference and subsequent edited collection are part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series; it was sponsored by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Cite this: Gish, Nancy. “‘Opening Out’: Jackie Kay’s Many Voices.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-gish-kay-many-voices. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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‘Jackie Kay: An International Conference’ was hosted online, 3 June 2021, and convened by Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Dr Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores University). The conference and subsequent edited collection are part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series; it was sponsored by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Cite this: Kay, Jackie. “Darling.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/video-jackie-kay-darling. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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C. J. Griffin

SOMEBODY ELSE

If I was not myself, I would be somebody else.
But actually I am somebody else.
I have been somebody else all my life.

It’s no laughing matter going about the place.
All the time being somebody else:
People mistake you; you mistake yourself.

Published in Jackie Kay’s Off Colour (1998), the poem ‘Somebody Else’ describes a split-self speaker, trapped in the titular refrain of being ‘somebody else’ (27), and this sets the keynote of the whole collection. This divided speaker feels that they are a secret unto themselves. They lack a definitive name, age, gender, race, or sexuality. They identify themselves by their estrangement. The two observations in ‘People mistake you; you mistake yourself’ are connected by a semi-colon, which seems to imply cause and effect (‘People mistake you because you mistake yourself’). However, the semi-colon could also connote opposition or contradiction between the observations. The grammatical context underpins the speaker’s insecurity about how they come across and their lack of independence. This existential and ontological vulnerability – a sense of oneself and the world around them as secret – recurs throughout Off Colour’s liminal and concealed speakers.

‘From Stranraer, South’ depicts a woman forced to repress her love for another woman, after her confession to her mother leaves the latter bedridden (42). Similarly, ‘Hottentot Venus’ depicts Sara Baartman, a nineteenth-century South African woman exploited in Europe through freak shows and circumscribed by racism: ‘My sigh is black. My heart is black. / My walk is black. My hide, my flanks. My secret’ (25). Only Baartman’s ‘secret’ avoids narration as either ‘black’ or bestial (as captured in the loaded words ‘hide’, and ‘flanks’). As in ‘Somebody Else’ and ‘From Stranraer, South’, secrecy is necessitated by outside forces. However, in ‘Hottentot Venus’, secrecy has an explicitly protective dimension. It expresses a limited but unexhausted agency, the possibility of something imperceptible railing and shouting back from within.

Jackie Kay’s concern with secrets and secrecy, being and becoming, are not restricted solely to Off Colour. Indeed, when talking about the act of writing, Kay has claimed: ’We often write because we have a secret self’. Secrets and secrecy are so foundational to our sense of self that they are part of the creation and defence of our identities and bonds with others. It is no wonder, then, that Kay, a writer fundamentally interested in possibility and identity, retains an abiding interest in visibility and invisibility, concealment and revelation, and the dynamic interplay of hiding and yet wishing to be seen.

The relationship that Kay’s work has with the secret is ambivalent. In Red Dust Road (2010), the known absence of Kay’s biological parents enables her fantasies about her birth mother being Shirley Bassey and her birth father ‘a handsome cross between Paul Robeson and Nelson Mandela’ (43). Yet when Kay has her first meeting with her biological mother, she describes it as being ‘like a kind of grief; only I’m not sure that I was grieving my birth mother, I think I was grieving the imaginary mother I’d had in my head’ (67). Rather than Kay’s mother, it is the secrecy that has preconditioned their relationship that forms part of Kay’s grief. Concealment enabled her imaginative invention of happier possibilities. Yet it also accentuates the pain of the moment when reality intervened.

However, the secret is not always a source of negative experience. For example, in Kay’s short story-collection Reality, Reality (2012), she often writes of love as a great and wonderful secret. ‘Grace and Rose’ describes the ‘[r]omance’ between the eponymous characters as ‘like a wee cove that nobody found but you… our secret’ (74–5). Similarly, in ‘Bread Bin’, the protagonist describes seeing contented relationships pass her by: ‘secretly smiling sixty-year-olds when I’m out and about’ (81). Thereafter, the protagonist describes the exploration of their own sexual identity and her first adolescent experiences of that ‘tight, secret feeling […] Love’ (82, 84). The story ends in describing this feeling again, in the present, when the protagonist wakes up from her sleep during a train journey and meets ‘Martha’: ‘There was something in the way that she smiled – a kind of openness. I knew then. I just knew that I would wake up many more times to Martha smiling at me’ (86). The love’s secret expressed as ineffable openness – a kind of affective resonance – is palpable here.

This regard for love as a secretive but exclusive experience of reality created by chance, can be neatly illuminated if we put it beside philosopher Alain Badiou’s writing about love in the present-day. In In Praise of Love (2012), Badiou laments a contemporary, contractual, ‘safety-first concept of “love” […] love comprehensively insured against all risks’. He identifies this understanding of love to be expressed by the appeal and purpose of online dating apps, which promise the elimination of risk, chance, and the ineffable – the secret, in other words. Comparatively, Kay’s own writing, above and elsewhere, celebrates love as a mysterious experience crafted by the certainty of chance and the chance of certainty. Connected to this, her debut novel, Trumpet (1998), focuses largely on the relationship of Joss and Millie Moody in post-WWII Glasgow. As with the chance encounter with Martha on the train in ‘Bread Bin’, Millie meets Joss ‘when giving blood on the same day’:

I approach him and ask him out. It is 1955. Women don’t do this sort of thing. I don’t care. I am certain this is going to be my lover. When you are certain of something, you must take your chance. (12)

All of Kay’s work ambivalently allows for the rehabilitation of the secret in a century increasingly deprived of a right to it. Secrets and secrecy compensate for privation and prejudice in Kay’s writing. But they also allow for a world in which the chance and risk of accidental encounters can create happier possibilities. ‘Without this love’, writes Kay, ‘nothing could ever be well’: it is a ‘gift the heart wrapped early in this life’ (‘Thirty-Five’, The Empathetic Store, 15).

Works cited

Badiou, Alain and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love trans. Peter Bush (London: Profile Books, 2012).

Kay, Jackie, Scottish Laureate Jackie Kay on Growing Up LGBTQ | One Person, Two Names | Random Acts, online short film, Random Acts – Channel 4, 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYY-hCuvS8c> [accessed 14 Oct 2021].

—, The Empathetic Store (Edinburgh: Mariscat Press, 2015).

—, Reality, Reality (London: Picador, 2012).

—, Red Dust Road (London: Picador, 2010).

—, Trumpet (London: Picador: 1998).

—, Other Lovers (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1993).

Cite this: Griffin, C. J. “Jackie Kay: Identity, Secrecy, and Love.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-kay-identity-secrecy-love. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Jackie Kay, 2016 (Photo: First Minister of Scotland, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Since her first attempt at writing a novel aged twelve – One Person, Two Names – Kay has written a myriad of works for adults and children: two novels, several poetry and short-story collections, a memoir, an autobiography, and plays for the stage and radio. She has received countless accolades for her work: most notably, a Saltire Society Literary Award for First Book of the Year (1992), a Lammy for Transgender Literature (1999), an MBE (2006), Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature (2002), a CBE (2020), and her aforementioned tenure as the Scots Makar (2016–2021).

Nevertheless, Kay’s writing maintains a critical and interrogative relationship towards both Britain and Scotland. Originally produced in 2007 for BBC R3’s ‘Abolition Season’, Kay’s play The Lamplighter (2008) marks the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade by exploring the impact of Scotland’s role in that inhuman enterprise:

It was a not so delicious irony that the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery was also the tricentenary of the union between Scotland and England, a union which allowed Scotland to profit from the slave trade in a big way (Kay 2020 [2008]: vii).

Alongside criticising the Union’s role in the slave trade, Kay has attacked the social, economic, and cultural legacy of Thatcherism in Britain, the punishment of asylum seekers and refugees by the state, the presence of Trident in Scotland, and the jingoistic nativism of contemporary politics. Kay’s creative critiques of the British union resonate with her broader focus on isolated outsiders and fragile relationships in the context of social identity. Discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and class are threaded throughout Kay’s work. This perhaps motivates her abiding concern with ‘the presence absence makes’ (Kay and Young, 2016: 32:10–32:16)  which intersects with Kay’s focus on dis/harmony of multiple identities, transformation and metamorphosis, death and grief, (unrequited) love and loneliness, memory and memorialisation, and the need for community – ‘a whole new life’ (Kay 1993: 41).

Cumulatively, Kay’s work stands in the space between ‘status quo’ and ‘outsider’. Not only does it provide a critical examination of Britain and who belongs in it, but it also forms a crucial contribution to imagining the possibility of a post-British society.

—C. J. Griffin, 2021

Cite this: Griffin, C. J. “Jackie Kay.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/jackie-kay. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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