Hannah Lowe is a poet and essayist whose writing explores multicultural society in Britain and its diasporic links, particularly to the Caribbean. She was born in Ilford to an English mother and Black Chinese Jamaican father, and began to write poetry while teaching English literature to sixth form students. This experience would later inform her Costa Prize award-winning collection The Kids (2021). Lowe is the author of several pamphlets, a memoir Long Time No See (2015) and three collections. The first two, Chick (2013) and Chan (2016), explore her family history, in particular her father’s, and the experiences of jazz musicians including Joe Harriott (a relative) and Charles Mingus, and newly arrived British immigrants of the 1950s. Of one of her early submissions, The Rialto editor Michael Machim said, “Every now and again there arrives at a poetry magazine a poem that clearly announces a new voice… with something to say, and in brilliant command of the means of saying it.” Lowe was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in July 2022, and currently teaches Creative Writing at Brunel University.
