“My reasons for writing began with my father, and he remains the elusive character I search for, opening one door after another.”
Hannah’s work, mainly as a poet, is concerned with migration histories, multicultural London and the complex legacies of the British Empire.
The Kids
The poet and former teacher Hannah Lowe reflects on the process of writing about youths in her Costa Award-winning collection, The Kids. Lowe considers the challenge of inhabiting a young person’s voice, conjuring empathy and understanding for the teenagers she taught and excited about poetry.
What do you value in the natural world?
Hannah Lowe and her young son’s experience of a fallen tree and her poem inspired by the event.
Hannah Lowe in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
Gabriel Gbadamosi interviews Hannah Lowe and they delve into some of the themes and forms of her poetry collections.
Biography
Hannah Lowe was born to a white English mother and Afro-Chinese Jamaican father. Lowe’s work centres around migration histories, multicultural London and the complex legacies of the British Empire. Her first poetry collection, Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013), blended these themes with a deeply personal commemoration of her father, a member of the Windrush generation. In her second collection, Chan (Bloodaxe, 2016), Lowe developed a new poetic form – the ‘borderliner’ – which uses typography and double narration to explore multi-heritage experiences. In Ormonde (Hercules Editions, 2014), Lowe excavated the story of the SS Ormonde, on which her father migrated. Her third full-length collection, The Kids, won the 2021 Costa Book of the Year and Poetry Award.
Lowe’s family memoir, Long Time No See (Periscope, 2015) was read by herself and the actor Colin Salmon as Radio 4’s Book of the Week in July 2015. In 2014, she was named as one of 20 ‘Next Generation Poets’ by the UK Poetry Society.
Lowe has been Poet-in-Residence at Keats House and a commissioned writer on the Colonial Countryside Project with the University of Leicester. She wrote the BBC4 long poem Borderliners (2019), which she performed with the actor Burt Caesar.
