Many congratulations to Hannah Lowe - winner of the Costa Book of the Year for The Kids! Our incredible Selectors picked it for our PBS Autumn Choice, so we couldn’t be happier for Hannah. Chair of the Judges Reeta Chakrabarti described The Kids as "joyous... warm and completely universal." Inspired by a decade teaching in an inner-city London sixth form, at the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets is her students. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self in the riotous 80s and her small son growing up in contemporary London. These are deeply felt poems interrogating the acts of teaching and learning, class, gender and race with empathy and humour. Boisterous and musical, these poems explore and explode the universal experience of what it is to be taught, and to teach, and reach out to the child within us all.
You can watch Hannah reading and discussing The Kids in these recordings from our PBS Showcase at NCLA, Durham Book Festival and Insta Live book club last Autumn. Hannah Lowe was born in Ilford to an English mother and Jamaican-Chinese father. Her first collection Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. Her second collection Chan was published in 2016 and in 2020 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University.
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