Hannah Lowe
Hannah Lowe was born in Essex to an Afro-Chinese father and White English mother. Her father’s death, when she was twenty-two, prompted her to begin writing and led to a wide range of literary investigations into the Chinese presence in the Caribbean, postwar migration to Britain, and of British multiculturalism. She holds an MA in Refugee Studies, and undertook a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
Her poetry and non-fiction prose has garnered numerous awards and accolades, including The Costa Book of the Year, The Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award and the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection. In September 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets. Her work has also featured widely on radio, including Radio 4’s Book of the Week, Free Thinking, and Front Row.
What is a neighbour? What makes a community? In this themed pamphlet, Hannah Lowe focuses on the urban places she knows and loves, and finds a rich complexity of neighbourliness under the extreme pressure. These poems look urgently into the future, into communities bearing the weight of austerity and gentrification, where global struggles manifest in the local. Nowhere is more at stake than the circle of home the author draws around her infant son, who must learn the fragile meanings of the neighbourhood.