Lowe wins Costa Book of the Year for 'joyous' The Kids

Hannah Lowe has won the £30,000 Costa Book of the Year award for her “joyous” and “warm” collection of poetry The Kids, published by Bloodaxe Books. 

Lowe was named the winner at an awards ceremony on 1st February at Pan Pacific London hosted by presenter and broadcaster Penny Smith. 

The Kids is the ninth collection of poetry to take the overall prize and the second Book of the Year win for independent publisher Bloodaxe Books, following Inside the Wave by late author and poet Helen Dunmore in 2017. 

A book of sonnets about teaching, learning, growing up and parenthood, it draws on Lowe’s decade of teaching in an inner-city London sixth form during the 2000s, as well as on her own coming of age in the riotous 1980s and 90s and concludes with poems about her young son learning to negotiate contemporary London.  

BBC News journalist and chair of judges Reeta Chakrabarti described The Kids as “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”.

She told The Bookseller that the panel spent “several hours” discussing all five books and “there was a lot of passionate and very vigorous debate”.

“It was a difficult choice,” she said, but stressed: “We were all behind The Kids and Hannah Lowe. I felt the centre of gravity in the room was with The Kids because it fulfils everything that the Costa Book of the Year should be. It’s very readable, very accessible, broad appeal, it’s the sort of book that you could hand to anybody because you would know that everyone would get something out of it.

“It is a book of poetry, it’s a book of sonnets, but Hannah Lowe is in no way constrained by the form of the poetry. The language just speaks very directly to the reader. It’s a very audacious, utterly successful book, I think, because it’s taking a classical art form, that goes back hundreds of years, and making it bang up-to-date, completely contemporary. We all thought it was so fresh and original.”

Lowe said she was “delighted” to win the award and thought it was particularly special for a collection of poetry to triumph. She told The Bookseller: “Poetry is having a very exciting time and I’m glad to be an advocate for it at the minute.”

She said: “I hope my book can continue what seems to me to be a bit of a changing trend in what’s happening with poetry. She added there is "absolutely amazing, brilliant writing around about all kinds of experience that maybe people wouldn’t associate with being present in poetry,”  citing work by Roger Robinson and Ray Antrobus "writing about lived experiences of migration, diaspora, of being mixed race about masculinity”.

Lowe also revealed she has two more books of poetry coming out in May, which are inspired by the Chinese part of her heritage and will investigate Britain’s historic entanglements with China. “I do hope to write something that is kind of educational for young people. There is a lot of talk at the minute about decolonising the curriculum and perhaps how the legacies of empire aren’t well known enough or aren’t taught as far as they should be in schools at the moment. So I’m hoping to contribute some work that is entertaining but also educational about those areas. But who knows, maybe I’ll just lie back and drink some Piña colada,” she said.

Neil Astley, editor and managing director of Bloodaxe Books told The Bookseller that The Kids will have an appeal “way beyond the usual readership for poetry”. He said: “That her poetry collection was preferred to those other four amazing books in the other categories is quite astonishing. The poetry category winner has won the Costa or Whitbread Book of the Year nine times in the past 50 years, the first seven times by Faber and now twice by Bloodaxe, with Hannah’s win following the posthumous award of Costa Book of the Year for 2017 to Helen Dunmore for her final collection Inside the Wave. I couldn’t be more delighted. We put through another reprint just before Christmas and I’m organising another one right now”.

This year’s judging panel also featured writer, broadcaster and Literary Salon founder Damian Barr; author Jessie Burton; poet and copywriter Rishi Dastidar; novelist, memoirist, and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo; author Smriti Halls; tennis coach Judy Murray; broadcaster and editor in chief of The Frank Magazine Melanie Sykes, and novelist, biographer and journalist Andrew Wilson. 

Lowe saw off a shortlist featuring the bookies’ favourite Claire Fuller for her novel Unsettled Ground (Fig Tree) as well as journalist-turned-author John Preston’s Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell (Viking), British-Ghanaian short story writer and photographer Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel Open Water (Viking) and actor, director, charity founder and children’s author, Manjeet Mann’s The Crossing (Penguin). 

To mark the 50th year of the awards, each author received a bespoke certificate specially created, designed and produced by leading letterpress studio the Garage Press, featuring traditional hand-printed elements using a vintage press merged with digital production techniques. 

Also announced on the night was the winner of this year’s £3,500 Short Story Award, taken by L E Yates, a London-based writer and lecturer, for her story “Sunblock” following a public vote. Two runners-up—Matthew Hurt from London and Lindsay Gillespie from Lewes—received £1,000 and £500 respectively.