Jackie Kay

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKBessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer.Scotlands 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 EVARISTOA wonderful writer on a magnificent singer.ROBERT WYATTKays book is the amplifier that Smiths voice deserves.SUNDAY TIMESThe 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. Smiths 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 dont usually bring the subject to life again. This one did. I finished the book then started it again immediately.PEGGY SEEGERWhat 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 MOLLESONPure joy: one trailblazing woman pays tribute to another. Jackie Kay finds the music in the short, dazzling, capricious life of Bessie Smith.HELEN LEWIS

Hot on the heels of Fiere and Red Dust Road, a generous new collection from a storyteller in a class of her own.

Jackie Kay's first collection as Scottish Makar is a book about the fighting spirit - one, the poet argues, that we need now more than ever. Bantam brings three generations into sharp focus - Kay's own, her father's, and his own father's - to show us how the body holds its own story. Kay shows how old injuries can emerge years later; how we bear and absorb the loss of friends; how we celebrate and welcome new life; and how we how we embody our times, whether we want to or not. Bantam crosses borders, from Rannoch Moor to the Somme, from Brexit to Bronte country. Who are we? Who might we want to be? These are poems that sing of what connects us, and lament what divides us; poems that send daylight into the dark that threatens to overwhelm us - and could not be more necessary to the times in which we live.

Los relatos que se presentan en este volumen, "Las últimas fumadoras" y "Grace y Rose", son dos ejemplos muy representativos del estilo claro y preciso de Kay. En ellas se observa la capacidad de la autora para transformar sus creaciones en espacios en los que naturaliza la diferencia étnica o sexual, recurriendo a un inteligente sentido del humor que no menoscaba en absoluto la intensidad de las situaciones presentadas.

Conocida como la Emperatriz del Blues, Bessie Smith fue un personaje complejo con una vida difícil, cuya historia supera en muchos aspectos la ficción. Sus hazañas se han convertido en material de leyenda, y sus canciones sobre tragedias amorosas y el sufrimiento de las mujeres a menudo parecen un terrible presagio de las desgracias que a ella misma le sucederian poco despues de escribirlas. Asi lo explica Jackie Kay, laureada poeta y escritora escocesa, que cuando era adolescente encontro en Bessie alguien con quien podia identificarse, un espejo en el que reconocer su propia negrura y un modelo de magnanimidad y osadia al que nunca ha dejado de idolatrar.