Jackie Kay was appointed Scots Makar (Scotland’s National Poet) in 2016 for a five-year term. Her debut collection of poems, The Adoption Papers (1991), tells the story of the adoption of a black girl by white parents through the voices of a birth mother, an adoptive mother and an adopted child. In her memoir Red Dust Road (2010) she explores the question ‘what makes us who we are?’ through the story of her own adoption and search for her birth parents. This photograph is part of a series of portraits of poets by McBeath and was made during the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2001.