Red Dust Road is an autobiographical novel by Scottish author Jackie Kay which tells the story of her twenty-year search for her birth parents, and her quest to be acknowledged by them both as their biological child. The book opens in the Nicon Hilton Hotel in Abuja, where Kay meets her natural father, a born again Christian who is disappointed that she has failed to give herself to Christ. The father and daughter do not bond, and never see each other again, because Kay is the walking symbol of the sin that he wants to leave behind him.
Kay was kept a secret from both her biological mother and father, adopted soon after her birth by communists living in Glasgow, Scotland; she lives a happy existence but the birth of her own child inspires her search and interest in where she herself came from. Kay weaves a fascinating tale of growing up in a 1970s Britain that was none too inclusive, and where she experienced bullying both as a child and as an adult. It is also the story of Kay's search for her own identity,.
Red Dust Road is Jackie Kay's best-known book, and she is also well-known in her native Scotland as a playwright and a poet. In 2016 she was appointed to the role of Scotland's Poet Laureate. She received her first accolade, th Somerset Maugham Award, in 1994 for the novel Other Lovers and in 2006 was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth I. Red Dust Road earned her the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award, and she was also shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley Prize. IN 2020 she was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honors List for Services to Literature.
