You think adoption is a story which has an end. But the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending.

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red Dust Road is one of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In a book remarkable for its warmth and candour, Kay discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that what triumphs, ultimately, is love.

Taking the reader from Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, Red Dust Road is a heart-stopping story of parents and siblings, friends and strangers, belonging and beliefs, biology and destiny.

Following on from her award-winning first novel, "Trumpet," comes a collection of superlative stories.

In true Kay style, these small masterpieces cover a great deal of emotional and narrative terrain, from an immaculate observation of the female physiognomy to the bewilderment of the elderly; from silent hidden love to a lifetime reminiscence of an immigrant's England. Warm and tender, frightening and funny, these stories confirm the arrival of a major storyteller.

'A stunner. I am heartbroken to have finished it' Ali Smith

'The beauty of Kay's stories is in how much they continue to resonate long after finishing' TIME OUT

'These pieces contain - and ultimately liberate - definitively human ordinariness, a rigmarole of isolation and love, fidelity and betrayal, noise and silence, birth and death' GUARDIAN

'One of the liveliest talents of her generation' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

A powerful poetry collection full of the drama, musicality and lyricism that Jackie Kay is famed for.

Exploring the themes of identity and age, this collection includes poems about the old days and the new days, and the places associated with an older generation, who often live dreamlike, isolated existences - not only geographically, but also in the memory.

Nature and the elements play a big role too: trees, the moon, the sea, fire. Jackie Kay's style is one moment witty, the next melancholic, or gently surreal - and in this brilliant reissued collection, her poems are infused with warmth and colour: in particular, the colour RED.

Perfect for fans of The Gift by Carol Ann Duffy and Rob Ryan, this gorgeous new gift edition is a must-have for any poetry fan.

Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Featuring Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest and many more. Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day. Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, you'll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard. Curated by two widely acclaimed poets, Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves. It deserves a place on the shelf of every reader keen to discover and rediscover how queer poets speak to one another across the generations.

Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love. It is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart.

With an introduction by author Ali Smith.

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village.

Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry... After years of travelling and losing almost everything - his country, his children, his wife, his farm - an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger's home... A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system... Modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the second volume of Refugee Tales sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained. Here, poets and novelists create a space in which the stories of those who have been detained can be safely heard, a space in which hospitality is the prevailing discourse and listening becomes an act of welcome.

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. Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

'The Forward Prizes have turned a spotlight on contemporary poetry which is both searching and glamorous' Carol Ann Duffy 100 Prized Poems brings together the best of the poems published over a quarter century in twenty-five editions of the Forward books of poetry, a series highlighting the works commended annually for the prestigious Forward Prizes. The roll-call of poets included is a Who's Who of poetry excellence and includes both familiar names - Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay, Derek Walcott - and fresh voices - Kae Tempest, Kei Miller and Emily Berry. This anthology of anthologies is a great way of encountering the richness that new poetry has to offer.

Jackie Kay's new collection is a lyric counterpart to her memoir, Red Dust Road, the extraordinary story of the search for her Nigerian and Highland birth-parents; but it is also a moving book in its own right, and a deep enquiry into all forms of human friendship. Fiere - Scots for 'companion, friend, equal' - is a vivid description of the many paths our lives take, and of how those journeys are made meaningful by our companions on the road: lovers, friends, parents, children, mentors - as well as all the remarkable and chance acquaintances we would not otherwise have made. Written with Kay's trademark wit and flair, and infused with both Scots and Igbo speech, it is also a fascinating account of the formation of a self-identity - and the discovery of a tongue that best honours it. Musical and moving, funny and profound, Fiere is Jackie Kay's most accomplished, assured and ambitious collection of poems to date.

Humor, gender, sexuality, sensuality, identity, racism, cultural difference: when do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay is part of the equation.

Darling brings together into a vibrant new book many favorite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, The Adoption Papers, Other Lovers, Off Colour and Life Mask, as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers.

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer. Scotland's National Poet Jackie Kay brings to life the tempestuous story of the greatest blues singer who ever lived. 'A gem of a book . . . beautiful.' BERNARDINE EVARISTO 'A wonderful writer on a magnificent singer.' ROBERT WYATT 'Kay's book is the amplifier that Smith's voice deserves.' SUNDAY TIMES 'The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read.' IAN CARR, BBC MUSIC BESSIE SMITH was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star. Smith's life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of 'bathtub gin', got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a cohort of the Ku Klux Klan. As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life. 'Biographies don't usually bring the subject to life again. This one did. I finished the book then started it again immediately.' PEGGY SEEGER 'What a life! What gulpable storytelling! Exactly the kind of writing about music we need: personal, ardent, playfully confrontational, questioning, undogmatic. A love song to a complicated idol.' KATE MOLLESON 'Pure joy: one trailblazing woman pays tribute to another. Jackie Kay finds the music in the short, dazzling, capricious life of Bessie Smith.' HELEN LEWIS

The women of Reality, Reality are mesmerizing, whether in love or in solitude. Full of compassion, generosity, sorrow and joy, their fifteen unforgettable stories explore the power of the imagination to make things real, and celebrate, most of all, those who dare to dream.

In The Lamplighter award-winning poet and Scottish Makar Jackie Kay takes us on a journey into the dark heart of Britain’s legacy in the slave trade.

First produced as a play, on the page it reads as a profound and tragic multi-layered poem. We watch as four women and one man tell the story of their lives through slavery, from the fort, to the slave ship, through the middle passage, following life on the plantations, charting the growth of the British city and the industrial revolution. Constance has witnessed the sale of her own child; Mary has been beaten to an inch of her life; Black Harriot has been forced to sell her body; and our lead, the Lamplighter, was sold twice into slavery from the ports in Bristol. Their different voices sing together in a rousing chorus that speaks to the experiences of all those brutalised by slavery, and lifts in the end to a soaring and powerful conclusion.

Stirring, impassioned and deeply affecting, The Lamplighter remains as essential today as the day it was first performed. This is an essential work by one of our most beloved writers.

Set in the late 1950s, this is the story of Evelyn Hall, an English Professor, who goes to Reno to obtain a divorce and put an end to her disastrous 16-year marriage. While staying at a boarding house to establish her six-week residency requirement she meets Ann Childs, a casino worker and fifteen years her junior. Physically, they are remarkably alike and eventually have an affair and begin the struggle to figure out just how a relationship between two women can last. Desert of the Heart examines the conflict between convention and freedom and the ways in which the characters try to resolve the conflict

From Aberdeen to the Isle of Wight, Out of Bounds is a newly charted map of Britain as viewed by its black and Asian poets. It takes the reader on a riveting, sensory journey through Scotland, England and Wales, showing the whole country from a fresh perspective. This extensive and ground-breaking anthology - with its sudden forks in the road, and its roads not taken - stops off in the Highlands and Islands, skirts the North East coast from Whitley Bay to the sands of Bridlington, wanders lonely through the Lake District and Yorkshire, climbs the mountains of Wales before descending to the Black Country and Southern England. Along the way it takes in lochs and landmarks from Glasgow's George Square and the Angel of the North to the London Eye and the Long Man of Wilmington. If alienation, unbelonging and dislocation remain key aspects of black and Asian experiences in Britain, what such terms simultaneously conceal are the rich and manifold attachments to place, region, city and landscape offered in Out of Bounds. The poems question the idea of an easy or singular identity, nimbly dealing with the triple bind of ethnic, geographical and poetic belonging. An alternative A to Z of the nation, a new poetic guide, the book enables us to look again at the UK's local and regional landscapes and the poets who pass through them. Out of Bounds is a definitive anthology that brings together new and established black and Asian writers and places them firmly on the map of what is great and not so great about Britain. Includes: Shanta Acharya, John Agard, Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, James Berry, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Vahni Capildeo, Merle Collins, Fred D'Aguiar, David Dabydeen, Imtiaz Dharker, Bernardine Evaristo, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Tariq Latif, Sheree Mack, Jack Mapanje, E.A. Markham, Daljit Nagra, Grace Nichols, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Michelle Scally-Clarke, Seni Seneviratne, John Siddique, Lemn Sissay, Dorothea Smartt, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Benjamin Zephaniah, and many others.

Drawing together the work of 12 leading playwrights, this National Theatre Connections anthology celebrates highlights from 21 years of the Connections festival with a retrospective selection of plays. Featuring work by some of the most prolific playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries, and together in one volume, the anthology offers young performers between the ages of 13 and 19 an engaging selection of plays to perform, read or study. Each play has been specifically commissioned by the National Theatre's literary department over the years, with the young performer in mind. In 2016, these plays were then performed by approximately 500 schools and youth theatre companies across the UK and Ireland, in partnership with multiple professional partner regional theatres at which the works were showcased. The anthology contains all 12 of the play scripts; notes from the writer and director of each play, addressing the themes and ideas behind the play; and production notes and exercises for the drama groups. This year's anniversary anthology includes plays by Snoo Wilson, Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt; Simon Armitage; Jackie Kay; Patrick Marber; Mark Ravenhill; Bryony Lavery & Frantic Assembly; Davey Anderson; James Graham; Katori Hall; Carl Grose; Stacey Gregg; and Lucinda Coxon.

When he was awarded an honorary degree in civil law at Newcastle University in 1967, Dr Martin Luther King gave an electrifying extemporaneous address, speaking without notes, in which he said: 'There are three urgent and indeed great problems that we face today...That is the problem of racism, the problem of poverty and the problem of war.' As part of a fifty year anniversary and celebration, this anthology gathers poets from both sides of the Atlantic to address the challenges set out by Dr King. It's a shock to think how little has changed, and that Martin Luther King could well be speaking right here, right now. In the spirit of Dr King and his work as a humanitarian and activist, this anthology brings together poems that offer powerful testimonies to the urgent issues Dr King defines and represents the polyphony of voices that speak in resistance to our continuing problems of racism, poverty and war. Featuring poems by Claudia Rankine, Grace Nichols, Yusef Komunyakaa, Moniza Alvi, Rita Dove, Daljit Nagra, Imtiaz Dharker, Fred D'Aguiar, Oliver de la Paz, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, John Agard, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, Toi Derricotte, Vahni Capildeo, Carl Phillips, Sarah Howe, Elizabeth Alexander, Ishion Hutchinson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Marilyn Nelson, Mimi Khalvati, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Pinsky, Bernardine Evaristo, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Major Jackson, Tim Seibles, Choman Hardi, Benjamin Zephaniah, Shazea Quraishi, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sandeep Parmar, Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Rae Paris, Kendel Hippolyte, Amali Rodrigo, Zaffar Kunial, Rishi Dastidar, Raymond Antrobus, Mai Der Vang, Martin Espada, Inua Ellams, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Gregory Pardlo, Edward Doegar, Degna Stone, MacDonald Dixon, Ada Limon, Philip Metres, Nick Makoha, Nathalie Handal, Lauren K Alleyne, Kevin Bowen, Bashabi Fraser, Satchid Anandan. Co-publication with Newcastle University.

To celebrate Aurora Metro's 30th anniversary as an independent publisher, 20% of profits will to go to the Virginia Woolf statue campaign in the UK. This is a revised edition of the publisher's inaugural publication in 1990, which won the Pandora Award from Women-in-Publishing. Inspirational in its original format, this new edition features poems, stories, essays and interviews with over 30 women writers, both emerging authors and luminaries of contemporary literature such as: A.S. BYATT, KIT DE WAAL, CAROL ANN DUFFY, PHILIPPA GREGORY, JACKIE KAY, MADELINE THIEN, CLARE TOMALIN, SARAH WATERS, and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf herself, EMMA WOOLF. Together with the original writing workshops plus black and white illustrations from women illustrators. Guest editor Ann Sandham has compiled the new collection.

The third in a series of annual anthologies, "The Best British Short Stories 2013" reprints the cream of short fiction, by British writers, first published in 2012. These stories appeared in magazines from the Edinburgh Review to Granta, in anthologies from various publishers, and in authors' own short story collections. They appeared online at "3: AM Magazine," "Fleeting" and elsewhere. This new anthology includes stories by: Charles Boyle, Regi Claire, Laura Del-Rivo, Lesley Glaister, MJ Hyland, Jackie Kay, Nina Killham, Charles Lambert, Adam Lively, Anneliese Mackintosh, Adam Marek, Alison Moore, Alex Preston, Ross Raisin, David Rose, Ellis Sharp, Robert Shearman, Nikesh Shukla, James Wall and Guy Ware.

The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers provides an essential anthology of six of the key plays that have shaped the trajectory of British black theatre from the late-1970s to the present day. In doing so it charts the journey from specialist black theatre companies to the mainstream, including West End success, while providing a cultural and racial barometer for Britain during the last forty years. It opens with Mustapha Matura's 1979 play Welcome Home Jacko which in its depiction of a group of young unemployed West Indians was one of the first to explore issues of youth culture, identity and racial and cultural identification. Jackie Kay's Chiaroscuro examines debates about the politics of black, mixed race and lesbian identities in 1980s Britain, and from the 1990s Winsome Pinnock's Talking in Tongues engages with the politics of feminism to explore issues of black women's identity in Britian and Jamaica. From the first decade of the twenty-first century the three plays include Roy Williams' seminal pub-drama Sing Yer Hearts Out for the Lads, exploring racism and identity against the backdrop of the World Cup; Kwame Kwei-Armah's National Theatre play of 2004, Fix Up, about black cultural history and progress in modern Britain, and finally Bola Agbage's terrific 2007 debut, Gone Too Far!, which examines questions of identity and tensions between Africans and Caribbeans living in Britain. Edited by Lynnette Goddard, this important anthology provides an essential introduction to the last forty years of British black theatre.

I want to find it all now know our names know the others in history so many women have been lost at sea so many stories have been swept away Chiaroscuro: (noun) the treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting. Aisha, Yomi, Beth and Opal couldn’t be more different, but when Aisha hosts a dinner party, the friends soon discover that they’re all looking for an answer to the same question. Does it lie in Aisha’s childhood? Or in Beth and Opal’s new romance? Who will tell them who they really are? What starts out as a friendly conversation between women, soon turns heated when Yomi reveals what she really thinks about Beth and Opal’s relationship. A searing, tender look at queer Black womanhood by award-winning writer and Scots Makar Jackie Kay.

BETWEEN THE ACTS, one of Virginia Woolf's most lyrical works, was published shortly after her death in 1941. Its central focus is the performance of a village pageant, written and directed by the energetic Miss La Trobe, encompassing the whole history of England from the Middle Ages to the verge of war in the Summer of 1939. The comic events on stage, the reactions of the villagers in the audience,the blend of past and present are all presented with affection and insight affirming Virginia Woolf's belief in art as the unifying principle of life. This edition contains the original text which Virginia Woolf was working on when she died.

Growing up in 70s Scotland as the adopted mixed raced child of a Communist couple, young Jackie blossoms into an outspoken, talented poet. Then she decides to find her birth parents... Based on the soul-searching memoir by Scots Makar Jackie Kay, Red Dust Road takes you on a journey from Nairn to Lagos, full of heart, humour and deep emotions. Discover how we are shaped by the folk songs we hear as much as by the cells in our bodies.