Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns

‘Kerry Hudson invites us to really understand the complexities of being born working class in Britain. Buy it, read it, tell everyone about it’ Jack Monroe`One of the most important books of the year’ Guardian’When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to offer, that you are worth nothing to society, can you ever escape that sense of being `lowborn’ no matter how far you’ve come?’Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma.Twenty years later, Kerry’s life is unrecognisable. She’s a prizewinning novelist who has travelled the world. She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books. But she often finds herself looking over her shoulder, caught somehow between two worlds.Lowborn is Kerry’s exploration of where she came from. She revisits the towns she grew up in to try to discover what being poor really means in Britain today and whether anything has changed. She also journeys into the hardest regions of her own childhood, because sometimes in order to move forwards we first have to look back.

Reviews of Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns

"Lowborn is in part an indictment of a country that claims to still have a functioning welfare state… Most of all, it is a moving portrait of the survival and eventual flourishing of a remarkable spirit" — John Harris * Guardian * "Elegant, compassionate and powerful… Challenging and compelling, Lowborntells the hidden story of what it means to be poor in Britain today" — Charlotte Heathcote * Sunday Express * "Kerry Hudson invites us to really understand the complexities of being born working class in Britain. Buy it, read it, tell everyone about it" — Jack Monroe "Kerry Hudson blew me away, opened my eyes… She's got such a great voice and can really tell a story" — Philippa Perry, author of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read * You're Booked * "I cannot imagine a more important or beautifully written book in 2019" — Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness