Jackie Kay – Red Dust Road Launch Night

This event is now fully booked. If you are interested in your name being added to the waiting list please contact the library.

Jackie Kay is known and loved for her fiction – a novel, and short stories -, for her poetry and her plays. In this revelatory and redemptive book, with characteristic generosity and humour, she tells the most inspirational of stories: her own.

Red Dust Road Exclusive Launch
Wednesday 23 June 2010, 7pm

‘I was adopted by warm-spirited Scottish communists. When people ask me if I’ve ever found my “real” Mum and Dad, it is them I think of. A while ago I tracked down my Nigerian birth father and discovered him to be a born-again Christian, who didn’t want his current family to know anything about me. “If people were to know about You,” he said, “they would lose their faith in God.” Heavens, I said. I hadn’t realized I was that powerful. He had my hands, my father, my gestures. Years before, I traced my birth mother and discovered her to be a Mormon. She had my voice, my mother, my patterns. Red Dust Road is a book about belonging and beliefs, strangers and family, biology and destiny. What makes us who we are? My adoption is a story that has happened to me. I couldn’t make it up.’

From Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, the much-anticipated Red Dust Road takes the reader on an intimate and unforgettable journey across continents and time.

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh. She is a poet, playwright, novelist and writer of short stories and has enjoyed great acclaim for her work for both adults and children. Her novel Trumpet won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and she has published two collections of stories with Picador, Why Don’t You Stop Talking? and Wish I Was Here. She lives in Manchester.

The evening will also see the return of Suzanne Bonnar to the library, who will fill the library with her smooth bluesy and seductive vocals supported by Alan Brown on the guitar.

This event is now fully booked. If you are interested in your name being added to the waiting list please click here to send us an email or you can call us on 0141 552 8345.

There is limited seating at this event, please arrive early to guarantee your seat at it is likely to end up standing room only. Entry will be on presentation of ticket unless you are on the guestlist. If you have any questions please call us on 0141 552 8345.

Red Dust Road is a Picador non-fiction hardback, released in June 2010. Many thanks to Picador for supporting this launch event.