Born in Kyle
A Love Letter tae an Ayrshire Childhood (Scots Edition)
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Born in Kyle
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Narrated by:
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Billy Kay
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Written by:
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Billy Kay
About this listen
One of the most important figures in the Scots revival of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is Billy Kay. Through radio, television, plays, creative writing and especially his hugely influential book Scots The Mither Tongue, Kay’s work helped change people’s negative perception of Scots and paved the way for its acceptance as a key element in Scottish cultural identity.
In Born in Kyle Kay goes back to his own linguistic and cultural roots and celebrates a sense of place and belonging in his native Galston in Ayrshire’s Irvine Valley. Looking back, Kay realises that his was the last of the pre-television generations, and life was lived in a strong Scots-speaking environment which would be eroded when television in English was beamed into every household from the early 1960s onwards.
In a vivid, gutsy and realistic Scots prose shot through with humour, Kay brings alive the characters he grew up with, some in personally recalled memoirs, others in short stories which bring out a history and a literary history inherited by local folk going back hundreds of years. This is his love letter to working class life in small town Scotland.
©2023 Billy Kay (P)2023 Billy KayWhat listeners say about Born in Kyle
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Daibhidh
- 2024-03-04
Essential Scots-language listening
Billy Kay's Born in Kyle audiobook was a delightful listen. This is the autobiography of the early years and youth of what Kay describes as the last years of an east-coast Scottish town's life and times just before and during the introduction to international TV culture. The book and its audio are narrated by Kay himself, a seasoned writer and broadcaster with clear and pleasant vocal delivery. Kay's Scots: The Mither Tongue was an important read for me in the 1980s; it gave me a more fulsome appreciation of why the Scots language is central to Scotland's identity and why it needs our care, preservation and promotion. So I was pleased to find Kay reading his own memories in and around Galston and around the world read aloud in his own Scots speech. Although the book is entirely told in the Scots language, it should be intelligible to anyone who has a familiarity with Scotland and its speech patterns. Unfamiliar words become clear in context and through repetition of vocabulary throughout the book. Given the paucity of prose audio in Scots available, I consider Born in Kyle to be essential listening for all with an interest in Scots. Hopefully this volume inspires others to do similar in their own respective dialects of the language. There are many such stories still to be told through the medium of Scots.
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