‘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)

‘Lowe’s skill at working with traditional forms has been strongly in evidence from her debut collection Chick onwards. She has an easy, conversational take on the iambic pentameter line, and is skilled at finding both full and slant rhymes that don’t come across as forced. This results in poems that feel contemporary, yet still have a sense of the language being heightened into song.’ – Alan Buckley, The Friday Poem, on The Kids

'The poems in the collection maintain their momentum and strength until the end, gripping and enchanting the reader in a continuum of surprising scenes and deft lines. This award-winning collection deserves to be considered one of the best publications of the year.' - Carla Scarano, London Grip, on The Kids

'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

'The use of the sonnet form in The Kids to write about and contain conflicting feelings is masterly and Hannah Lowe's exploration of her years of teaching, her own life and the changes in it reflect contemporary life and its problems. Witty, generous, hones, thought-provioking and accessible, she has a unique voice which is both welcome and relevant.' - Myra Schneider, ARTEMISpoetry

'There's so much to enjoy here that it's no surprise the book won Lowe the 2021 Costa Poetry Award, as well as the overall 2021 Costa Book of the Year - a remarkable feat for a poetry collection. Lowe has described how she came late to poetry, and started writing while she was trying to enthuse her own students. There's a humility here - but also love fitting for a book of sonnets.' - Sarah Hegarty, Writing in Education, 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. She has been poet in residence at Keats House, and in 2020 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. 

 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 (Out-Spoken Press) in 2019. 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.

8 The White Dog

I
11 The Register
12 Try, Try, Try Again
13 Queen Bee
14 The Art of Teaching I
15 The Art of Teaching II
16 The Art of Teaching III
17 Technology
18 Sonnet for Vlad
19 The Only English Kid
20 Notes on a Scandal
21 Boy
22 Simile
23 The Sixth-form Theatre Trip
24 Sonnet for the A Level English Literature and Language Poetry Syllabus
25 Red-handed
26 Sonnet for the Punched Pocket
27 Pepys
28 Janine I
29 Janine II
30 The Unretained
31 All Over It
32 Sonnet for Rosie
33 Something Sweet
34 7/7
35 Ricochet
36 British-born

II
38 Mr Presley
39 Mrs Vanuka
40 Blocks
41 She
42 Bethena
43 Étudier
44 Martin and Pam
45 The Only Black Girl
46 Rain Dance
47 The Pitch
48 John I: Pink Humming Bird
49 John II: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf
50 Love
51 So Amazing
52 The Stroke
55 Sonnet for Noah
56 Welling
57 Dear Professor
58 White Roses
59 Daughter
60 House
61 The River
62 Players

III
64 The Sky Is Snowing
65 Skirting
66 Scooting
67 Fire Scissors Drowning
68 The Size of Him
69 Sonnet for Boredom
70 Balloons
71 In H&M
72 Sonnet for Darren
73 Zoom
74 Aretha in the Bath
75 His Books
76 Anjali Mudra
77 Sonnet for Rory with Soap Bubbles
78 Nĭ hăo
79 Kathy, Carla