Published in 2020 (first published 2008)
112 pages
Born in Glasgow in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Jackie Kay was adopted by a white couple, Helen and John Kay, as a baby. Brought up in Bishopbriggs, a Glasgow suburb, she has an older adopted brother, Maxwell as well as siblings by her adoptive parents.
Kay’s adoptive father worked full-time for the Communist Party and stood for election as a Member of Parliament, and her adoptive mother was the secretary of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Initially harbouring ambitions to be an actress, she decided to concentrate on writing after encouragement by Alasdair Gray. She studied English at the University of Stirling and her first book of poetry, the partially autobiographical The Adoption Papers, was published in 1991, and won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award. Her other awards include the 1994 Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers, and the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, based on the life of American jazz musician Billy Tipton, born Dorothy Tipton, who lived as a man for the last fifty years of her life.
Kay writes extensively stage, screen, and for children. In 2010 she published Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her birth parents, a white Scottish woman, and a Nigerian man. Her birth parents met when her father was a student at Aberdeen University and her mother was a nurse. Her drama The Lamplighter is an exploration of the Atlantic slave trade. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March 2007 and published in poem form in 2008.
Jackie Kay became a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) on 17 June 2006. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Kay lives in Manchester.
What is this book about?
The Lamplighter takes us on a journey through the dark heart of slavery. Produced both as a radio and stage play, it also reads as a stirring and a multi-layered poem. Four women and one man tell the story of their lives through slavery, from the 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. The Lamplighter focuses on parts of history other books rarely touch upon, revealing the devastating human cost of slavery for individual people. Constance has had to witness the sale of her own child; Mary has been beaten to an inch of her life; Black Harriot has had to become a high class whore; and our lead, the Lamplighter was sold twice into slavery from the ports in Bristol. All four very different voices tell their story, in a rousing chorus that speaks to the experiences of all those oppressed by the slave trade, lifting in the end to a soaring and rally conclusion.
Radical and widely acclaimed when it was first staged, this groundbreaking play from one of our most beloved poets and writers, Jackie Kay, remains as urgent and daring to this day.
