Award-winning Scottish poet Jackie Kay has been appointed the new writer-in-residence at the Bronte Parsonage Museum.

The Bronte Society said she will regularly engage with visitors and students at the Haworth museum during the next few months.

Jackie has already embarked on a series of new pieces exploring the lives and works of the Bronte sisters.

A series of public events, including poetry workshops and readings, will showcase the prose.

This will culminate in an exhibition and reading at the Parsonage Museum in March next year, as part of the annual Bronte Festival of Women’s Writing.

Jackie said she had grown up with the Brontes, through Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette and Emily’s poetry, and had returned to them again and again all her reading life.

She added: “It’s a huge privilege to be at the Parsonage, to put the pieces of the Bronte jigsaw together, and to be freshly inspired by this inspirational family.

“The Parsonage Museum is astonishing – the care that has been taken to bring the past to the present. I’m hoping to write a series of linked poems.”

Jackie came to prominence in 1992 as winner of The Scottish First Book Award for her volume of poetry The Adoption Papers.

Her third volume of poetry – Trumpet – won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998, and her memoir Red Dust Road, about her search for her natural parents in Scotland and Nigeria, drew wide critical acclaim for the warmth of her storytelling and the beauty of her poetry.

Now living in Manchester, Jackie was awarded the MBE in June 2006 and teaches creative writing at Newcastle University.

Ann Sumner, the Bronte Society’s executive director, said: “We are most enthusiastic about the prospect of working with a writer who is so enthusiastic about the Brontes, and who has produced such evocative prose.”

Bronte Society Council chairman, Sally McDonald, said she was already looking forward to reading Jackie’s Bronte-inspired work.

“All the Bronte family wrote poetry and found inspiration here at the Parsonage,” she added.