What does it really mean to be poor in Britain today? A prizewinning novelist revisits her childhood and some of the country's most deprived towns
'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, revisiting 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.
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This is my story told as well as I can tell it.- NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
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(Vintage Digital, 14 August 2019, audiobook, 8 hrs 15 mins, borrowed from Glasgow Libraries via BorrowBox)
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I loved Lowborn. I'm working class and can relate to some of the author's experiences though I wasn't poor and have never been put in care. This is an incredible book, sad a times, gripping and heart-breaking. I loved it when Kerry revisits some of the places in the UK that shaped her alternating these chapters with flashbacks of her childhood and youth. Her observations of the often cruel and plain wrong assumptions people make about poor people and those on benefits are spot-on. The UK society with its division between class is a broken one but it's been broken for generations and may never be fixed. This is a riveting book.
