Only Artists

Poet and novelist Jackie Kay meets Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid. Jackie Kay is currently the Scottish Makar or poet laureate. Her first collection, The Adoption Papers, was published in 1991, and drew on her own experience as a black child, adopted at birth by a white couple. Since then she has written prize-winning poetry, stories and fiction, as well as a memoir, Red Dust Road, about tracing and finding her birth parents. In 2017 Lubaina Himid became the first black woman to win the Turner Prize – and its oldest winner, at the age of 63. Her paintings and installations often focus on hidden black history and creativity - so for her work Swallow Hard: The Lancastrian Dinner Service, she overpainted willow pattern plates with images of slavery. She lives and works in Preston and is professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Producer Clare Walker