I was very lucky to be invited to the closing event of the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2024, sponsored by the Open University in Scotland, to see: Jackie Kay: People's Poet.
Jackie Kay, poet and novelist, is a stalwart of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. This year, she featured at the beginning, interviewing Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson in the McEwan Hall. She went on to participate in Shared Stories with Adjoa Andoh, during which the women looked at their lifelong friendship. And then concluded the 2024 Festival, ably hosted by Michael Pederson, talking about her latest collection May Day.
This final event was relaxed in the extreme. Kay checked that various friends were actually in the audience and then entertained herself – and the rest of us – by turning frequently to the subtitles to see how they coped with her words, especially the less polite ones.
Jackie Kay exudes warmth, but it wasn’t all fun and games. May Day, dedicated to her late parents, John and Helen Kay, who were frequent guests at her Book Festival events, references their deaths amidst the beautiful and poignant writing. A work full of sadness and loss, activism and friendship, the collection includes poems for Kay’s son Matthew, who was injured while taking part in a Black Lives Matter protest.
It was an excellent send-off for this year’s Book Festival. My ticket was courtesy of the event’s sponsor, The Open University in Scotland, and whom very kindly chose my own debut novel, The Almost Truth, as one of their ‘picks’ of the festival. I’m honoured to be on a shelf with friends, Olga Wojtas and Catherine Simpson – and of course, sharing space with Jackie Kay herself!
Anne x
