Scotland’s makar – poet laureate - Jackie Kay has been awarded a CBE in the Queen’s New Year honours list. In 2006 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature. Jackie Kay was born to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father in Edinburgh in 1961, and was adopted as a baby by Helen and John Kay, who had already adopted a boy, Maxwell. The family lived in Glasgow; John worked full time for the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Helen was the Scottish secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Kay has drawn on her unconventional upbringing in her poetry, and described it in an account of the search for her birth parents, Red Dust Road (2010), which she has called a “love letter” to her white adoptive parents.

The experience of being adopted by and growing up within a white family inspired her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers (1991). The poems deal with an adopted child's search for a cultural identity and are told through three different voices: an adoptive mother, a birth mother and a daughter. The collection won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and a commendation by the Forward Poetry Prize judges in 1992.

The poems in Other Lovers (1993) explore the role and power of language, inspired and influenced by the history of Afro-Caribbean people, the story of a search for identity grounded in the experience of slavery. The collection includes a sequence of poems about the blues-singer Bessie Smith. Off Colour (1998) explores themes of sickness, health and disease through personal experience and metaphor. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, and she has written widely for stage and television.

Her first novel, Trumpet, published in 1998, was awarded the Guardian Fiction prize. Inspired by the life of musician Billy Tipton, the novel tells the story of Scottish jazz trumpeter Joss Moody, whose death revealed that he was, in fact, a woman. She has also published several collections of short stories.

Another collection of poetry, Life Mask, was published in 2005; a novella, Sonata, in 2006; Darling: New and Selected Poems in 2007; and a dramatised poem, The Lamplighter, appeared in 2008. The Lamplighter explores the Atlantic slave trade and was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2007. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. Her Maw Broon Monologues, performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, and combining rhythmic verse and music, were shortlisted for the 2010 Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry.

Recent books include Bantam (2017), her first poetry collection since being named Scottish makar, the Scottish equivalent of poet laureate. Jackie Kay lives in Manchester and is professor of creative writing at Newcastle University.  In 2014 she was appointed chancellor of the University of Salford. She was appointed Scottish makar in 2016.