The Scots Makar (Scottish Poet Laureate) Jackie Kay, MBE, FRSE will be the special guest of the Keats-Shelley House on Saturday the 25^th of May at 5 p.m.. 

On this occasion she will read a selection of her celebrated poems, which have been beautifully rendered into Italian by Floriana Marinzuli and Bernardino Nera in the edition titled Compagna [Original title: Fiere], Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, 2018. 

Advance booking is mandatory as the number of seats is limited. Please call on 06 678 42 35 or email [email protected] for more information.

Jackie Kay is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays, whose subtle investigation into the complexities of identity have been informed by her own life. Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, she was adopted as a baby by a white couple. Kay's awareness of her different heritages inspired her first book of poetry, The Adoption Papers, which dramatises her experience through the creation of three contrasting narrators: an adoptive mother, a birth mother and a daughter. The book was a great success, winning the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and a commendation from the Forward Poetry Prize judges. Subsequent collections and her celebrated first novel, Trumpet, have continued to explore issues of cultural and sexual identity as well as the intimacies and upheavals of love. Kay has also written poetry for children and her first children's novel, Strawgirl, was published in 2002. She currently lives in Manchester.   

Jackie Kay is also the Guest Judge of the twenty-eighth Keats-Shelley House Poetry Prize for Schools.