Hannah Lowe

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, and went on to teach Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.[1] She 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]

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]

• 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

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