Overview

The Festival ends by welcoming back two poets with long connections with Newcastle, to read from their new collections and to talk with each other about poetry, politics and activism.  

Jackie Kay was for many years Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, having first been Northern Arts Literary Fellow. She went on to be the third modern Makar, the National Poet of Scotland, from 2016-21, and has since become Professor of Creative Writing at Salford University. She has published a novel, Trumpet, which won the Guardian Fiction prize, three collections of stories from Picador, and a memoir Red Dust Road which was Scottish Book of the Year. Her poetry collections include The Adoption Papers and Darling from Bloodaxe, and more recently Fiere and Bantam from Picador. May Day is the new collection, hot off the press from Picador, which is a personal chronicle of activism over six decades. It also includes poems of grief at the recent losses of Kay’s parents, poems which are also infused with love and celebration. 

Fred D’Aguiar, like Kay, was Northern Arts Literary Fellow. He also held a Leverhulme visiting professorship at Newcastle University. Born in London, of Guyanese parents, he grew up in Guyana and returned to the UK as a teenager. Now emigrated to the USA, he is currently Professor of English at UCLA. Like Kay he is also a distinguished writer in multiple genres, including novels – he has written six, the most recent of which is Children of Paradise (Granta 2015) – and a non-fiction book, The Year of Plagues (Carcanet, 2021), which recounts a time of both protest and personal survival. He has written eight poetry collections, including Mama Dot, his first, Continental Shelf, which was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot prize in 2009 and Letters from America, which was a PBS choice. His latest collection is For the Unnamed (Carcanet, 2023), which recovers and reimagines the story of the anonymous black jockey, who won a famous race in 1854. 

This event is supported by the Newcastle University Institute of Creative Practice.