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

A powerful, personal agenda-changing exploration of poverty in today’s Britain.’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.’One of the most important books of the year’ Guardian

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

Beautifully written but with emotional hand grenades detonating on almost every page…a breathtaking odyssey — Stephen McGinty * Sunday Times * 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 An essential read * Stylist Remarkable Women Awards 2020 * Compelling, fascinating and well-written, undeniably grim but peppered with humour and tenderness, every chapter a testimony to someone's goodness or fortitude, to the kindness of strangers… Hudson demonstrates that only by lifting whole communities out of poverty, by properly looking after looked-after children and funding a well-rounded welfare state, can we hope to avoid consigning children and young people like her – vulnerable and blameless – to the worst of lives — Kit de Waal * Daily Telegraph * If there were any justice in the world, there would be a copy of Hudson's powerful examination of her impoverished upbringing and why it continues to resonate under every politician's Christmas tree — Sarah Hughes * i Books of the Year *