Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe (born 1976) is a British writer, known for her collection of poetry Chick (2013) and family memoir Long Time, No See (2015) and her research into the historicising of the Empire Windrush and postwar Caribbean migration to Britain.^[1][2][3][4]

Biography[]

Lowe was born in Ilford, Essex, in 1976. She studied American Literature at the University of Sussex, and has a master's degree in Refugee Studies, subsequently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University.^[5] She taught English Literature at a London sixth form, and went on to teach Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University, Kingston University. She now lectures at Brunel University.^[1]

Lowe began writing poetry at the age of 29 after her Jamaican-Chinese father died and her English mother had a stroke, later reflecting: "I had been suppressing a lot of grief over a sustained period of time and poetry... opened a door on that pain. I found that I could revisit the past in my poems, and contain it, or alter it even."

Following a suggestion by John Glenday at a course in 2010, Lowe began to write about her father — who had sailed from Jamaica to Britain on the SS Ormonde in 1947^[6] — and this led to her debut poetry collection Chick, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013.^[3] This work was shortlisted for the Forward and Fenton Adelburgh First Collection Prizes. In September 2014, the Poetry Book Society included Lowe in its list of Next Generation Poets, published each decade.^[4] In 2015, Chick won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection.

Lowe's family memoir Long Time, No See was published by Periscope in July 2015 and was featured on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week.^[1][7] Lowe cites Gerard Manley Hopkins, Anne Sexton, and Mark Doty as influences for her work.^[3]

Lowe's most recent work is the chapbook The Neighbourhood, published by Out-Spoken in 2018, a social commentary on communities and gentrification which emerged from her role as poet-in-residence at Keats House, London. In 2020, she won a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Her forthcoming collection, The Kids, will be published by Bloodaxe in 2021.

Bibliography[]

• The Hitcher (32 pages), 2011
• Chick, 2013, ISBN 978-1852249601
• Ormonde (chapbook), 2014, ISBN 9780957273825
• Long Time, No See, 2015, ISBN 978-1859643969
• Chan, 2016, ISBN 978-1780372839
• The Neighbourhood, 2019, ISBN 978-1999679224

References[]

External links[]

• Hannah Lowe website
• Melissa Richards, "Making her claim: Writer Hannah Lowe", Caribbean Beat, Issue 124 (November/December 2013).