'I felt a strange grief when I found my birth mother': Jackie Kay on The Adoption Papers

The poet explains how researching her history led her to tell the story from three perspectives: the birth mother, the adoptive mother and the daughter

In one way, I'd been writing the poems in The Adoption Papers for my whole life. I'd been making up an imaginary birth mother and father with my adoptive mother for years, since I was a kid. She would say of my birth father: I'm picturing a Paul Robeson figure, Jackie, perhaps with a bit of Nelson Mandela mixed in."

In another, I started writing the book when I was pregnant. It's difficult when your writing infiltrates your life and vice versa, difficult to work out what actually happened and what didn't. Your imaginative life is your reality.