Photo credit: Lealle
Hannah Lowe
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: Hannah Lowe was born in Ilford to an English mother and Jamaican-Chinese father. Her 2021 poetry collection, THE KIDS, won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2021. THE KIDS also won the Costa Poetry Award 2021, was shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2021 and an Irish Times and Guardian poetry book of the year.
Her first book-length collection, CHICK, won the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and was selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. Her second full-length collection, CHAN, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016, followed by a pamphlet, THE NEIGHBOURHOOD (Out-Spoken Press) in 2019. Her prose memoir, LONG TIME NO SEE, exploring her relationship with her half-Chinese, half-Jamaican immigrant father, was published by Periscope in 2014.
Visit Hannah’s website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
THE KIDS
Poetry, 80 pages, Bloodaxe Books, Sept 2021
Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are fictionalised portraits of 'The Kids', the students she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London. Across these deeply felt poems, Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour. Social class, gender and race - and their fundamental intersection with education - are investigated with an ever critical and introspective eye. These boisterous and musical poems explore the universal experience of what it is to be taught, to learn and to teach.
LONG TIME NO SEE
Memoir, 333 pages
Periscope, July 2015
Beautiful memoir by about Hannah's search for the truth about her father, a Jamaican-Chinese professional gambler and card sharp.
THE HITCHER
Pamphlet, 34 pages
The Rialto, 3 April 2012
CHICK
Poetry, 64 pages
Bloodaxe Books, 24 January 2013