Jackie Kay to speak at major annual event

Jackie Kay is to give the 2026 Jimmy Reid Memorial Lecture, an important annual event in Scottish political and cultural life.

The event will be at Glasgow City Chambers on Tuesday 20 October, and is organised by the Jimmy Reid Foundation.

Jackie is ideally placed to share messages about the importance of culture, creativity, emotion and progressive values - and to encourage reflection on the ways these relate together.

Her many remarkable books include poetry, fiction, autobiography and a biography of Bessie Smith. Her first poem sequence The Adoption Papers won the Forward Prize (Edinburgh-born Jackie was adopted by Helen and John Kay and brought up in Glasgow: her adoptive parents were respectively the sectretary of Scottish CND and a long-serving full-time official of the Communist Party of Great Britain); she was Makar (National Poet for Scotland), from 2016 to 2021; and the 2024 collection May Day draws feeling and emotion from several decades of political activism, recalling the international solidarity of the Glasgow of her childhood, accompanying her parents’ campaigns, through involvement in the feminist, LGBT+ and anti-racist movements of the 80s and 90s, and into more recent times.

Published 11 September 2026