The Kids

Winner of the 2021 Costa Book of the Year

Winner of the 2021 Costa Poetry Award

Shortlisted for the 2021 T S Eliot Prize

Poetry Book Society Choice

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.

‘Hannah Lowe’s The Kids is a book to fall in love with - it’s joyous, it’s warm and it’s completely universal. It’s crafted and skilful but also accessible... You will love it!’ - Reeta Chakrabarti, Chair of Judges, 2021 Costa Book of the Year

'The Kids is the real deal. A page turner about the experience of teaching and being taught, it made us want to punch the air with joy... A contemporary book that buzzes with life while re-energising the sonnet that Shakespeare would recognise. All readers will find something of themselves here.' - Costa Poetry Award Judges Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig and Maya Jaggi

'Hannah Lowe's brilliant and entertaining book of sonnets, The Kids, is one of the most humorous and tender collections of recent times.' - Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times (The year in verse: the best poetry of 2021)

‘Hannah Lowe’s The Kids, inspired by her time teaching in an inner London sixth form, is a series of sonnets full of joy. The book is generous in its compassion, and in love with the idea of learning, in the classroom and outside it.’ – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (Best poetry books of 2021)

'The Kids by Hannah Lowe. This book reads very much like a labour of love. Anyone who commits to writing, and asks the reader to commit to reading, 66 sonnets has got to have plenty to say. These poems never flinch and the best of them (‘The Only English Kid’, ‘In H&M’, ‘Janine I/II’) leave us caring for the kids as much as she does.' - Carl Tomlinson, Poetry News (Best poetry books of the year 2021)

'The first half of Hannah Lowe’s sonnet sequence The Kids is an affectionate portrait of her time teaching a class of struggling students (“Each page we read is a step up a mountain/ in gluey boots”). The second reflects on family and her own schooldays, with memorable lines on messy adolescent desire: there’s a boy whose “voice was like a shirt unbuttoning”. Lowe’s social conscience, grounded register and frank humanity recall Tony Harrison...' - Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph, on the 2021 T S Eliot Prize Shortlist

'The Kids asks awkward questions about institutionalized education, but retains an unshakable faith in the kids and the joy they derive from learning and from their world and, because of this, it imagines a bright future.' - John Field, for the T S Eliot Prize

‘Hannah Lowe’s previous two collections, Chick and Chan, focused on her relationship with her Jamaican-Chinese father, alongside coming-of-age recollections. The Kids marks a departure: an introspective book of modern sonnets, it offers a glimpse into her experiences of teaching in an inner-city London sixth form. The collection includes homages to her own teachers, and concludes with a sequence lovingly written for her young son… This is a playful yet moving collection...’ – Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian, best recent poetry

‘Hannah Lowe’s The Kids combines formal skill with a rare bravery, and bears a lightness of touch that is often virtuosic. This book of sonnets is deeply enjoyable to read… The sequencing of the sonnets is brilliant, so that the book unfolds and deepens with every new page.’ – Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times

‘Hannah Lowe’s third full-length collection The Kids is a book of loose, light-touch sonnets about growing up and growing old, parents and children, teaching and learning.’ – Andy Croft, Morning Star

‘This collection gleams with contemporary sonnets that sing on the page. The conversational poems centre around Lowe’s experience of teaching at a sixth form in London and reckon with the immeasurable impact of learning… The vitality of these poems is tangible.’ – Annie Hayter, Big Issue (London)

'Always, we are in the hands of Lowe's singular, effortless voice, and reminded that all good education should be an education in class, in the legacies and histories of empire and in the self.' – Andrew McMillan, Poetry Book Society Bulletin

'Chick was a hard act to follow. In this painfully aware, complex and very dynamic collection, Hannah Lowe has more than succeeded. Anyone entering teaching would do well to read it. As would everyone else.' - Beth McDonough, DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts) on The Kids

'Lowe’s book is a collection of sonnets focused primarily on her life as a teacher in London, but it also looks back to her time as a student and outside the school to dating and grieving. The poems are funny, tender, occasionally inspiring and sometimes achingly sad — which pretty much sums up a career in teaching. The [Costa Book of the Year] judges said The Kids "has a universality to it — in a simple way, because everybody’s been to school.” Indeed, I want to give copies to half a dozen teachers — starting with my wife and my younger daughter.' - Ron Charles, Washington Post newsletter

Hannah Lowe was born in Ilford to an English mother and Jamaican-Chinese father. She has lived in London, Brighton and Santa Cruz, California. She studied American Literature at the University of Sussex and has a Masters degree in Refugee Studies, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University. She has worked as a teacher of literature, and is now a lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University. Her pamphlet The Hitcher (The Rialto, 2011) was widely praised. Her first book-length collection Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) won the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and was selected for the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. This was followed by two pamphlets, R x (sine wave peak, 2013) and Ormonde (Hercules Editions, 2014), and her family memoir Long Time No See (Periscope, 2015). She also read from Long Time, No See on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in 2015. Her second full-length collection, Chan, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016, followed by a pamphlet, The Neighbourhood (Outspoken Press) in 2019. She has been poet in residence at Keats House, and in 2020 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Her third full collection, The Kids (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2021. It won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.