'Part Fable, Part Porridge': Professor Jackie Kay and Dame Professor Hermione Lee on Writing the Self

‘Part Fable, Part Porridge’:

Professor Jackie Kay and Dame Professor Hermione Lee on Writing the Self

Jeniam Conversations

For many theorists of autobiography, the form assumes a self that can be known and a life that can be accounted for. But how do you write an autobiography when your origin and identity are unknown, uncertain, or multiple?

Such questions have animated Professor Jackie Kay's poetry and prose memoirs, including The Adoption Papers (1991) and Red Dust Road (2010). Born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Kay was adopted as a baby by a white communist couple in Glasgow. Her writing asks how the self is made: through blood, through stories, and through the communities and landscapes that claim us. It also confronts the challenge of how to write a self shaped by imagination, song, and the fierce love of the family who chose her—a self she describes as being ‘part fable, part porridge’. In so doing, Kay probes the nature and possibilities of life-writing itself.

In conversation with Professor Dame Hermione Lee, Kay reflects on writing Red Dust Road, on what prose autobiography offers the life-writer that poetry cannot—and vice versa—and on the relationship between self-knowledge and narrative form. Their discussion will also consider the ethics of life-writing, the challenge of writing about living people, and what it means to tell a story that is also, inevitably, someone else’s.

The conversation will appeal to writers, readers, and scholars of life-writing, as well as to anyone drawn to questions of identity, family, and the stories we tell in order to become who we are. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

Speaker Details:

Credit: Shaw & Shaw

Professor Jackie Kay is a Scottish poet, novelist, and memoirist whose work has explored race, adoption, identity, and belonging across more than three decades. Her debut poetry collection, The Adoption Papers (1991), written in the three voices of an adopted child, her adoptive mother, and her birth mother, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Saltire Society First Book Award, and a Scottish Arts Council Prize, establishing her as a major new voice in British literature. Her novel Trumpet (1998) won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the IMPAC Award. Her memoir Red Dust Road (2010) won the Scottish Book of the Year Award and the London Book Award and was shortlisted for the J.R. Ackerley Prize. She served as Scotland’s Makar—the national poet—from 2016 to 2021. She is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and holds a professorship in Creative Writing at the University of Salford.

Professor Dame Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a literary biographer, and her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black prize for biography), Tom Stoppard (2020), and Anita Brookner (forthcoming, September 2026). She has also written and edited books on life-writing, including a Very Short Introduction to Biography, a collection of essays, Body Parts, and (with Dr Kate Kennedy) Lives of Houses. In 2023, she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW in 2011.

Further Details and Contacts:

Join us after the event for a wine reception and book sale by Caper.

This event is free and open to all. If you are able, please consider making a donation of £5, £10, or £20 to support the Centre’s activities and outreach initiatives. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Registration is required. Registration will close at 14:30 on 29/05/2026.

The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.