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

A powerful, personal, agenda-changing work of non-fiction on poverty in Britain from acclaimed novelist, activist and columnist Kerry Hudson

‘Totally engrossing and deliciously feisty’ Bernardine Evaristo

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