Poetry Club: Hannah Lowe & Caroline Bird

(This is a past event and is no longer running)

Our popular contemporary poetry series, Poetry Club, returns to The Coronet Theatre in our candlelit bar featuring readings from 2021’s Costa Book of the Year winner Hannah Lowe and Caroline Bird.

Poetry Club is supported by the TS Eliot Foundation

Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe is a poet, memoirist, and critic. She was named a Poetry Book Society Next Generation Poet in 2014 and won a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2020. Her latest poetry collection The Kids just won Costa Book of the Year and it is from this collection that she will read.

“Hannah Lowe’s The Kids is a book to fall in love with – it’s joyous, it’s warm and it’s completely universal. It’s crafted and skilful but also accessible… You will love it!” – Reeta Chakrabarti, Chair of Judges, 2021 Costa Book of the Year

“Hannah Lowe’s previous two collections, Chick and Chan, focused on her relationship with her Jamaican-Chinese father, alongside coming-of-age recollections. The Kids marks a departure: an introspective book of modern sonnets, it offers a glimpse into her experiences of teaching in an inner-city London sixth form. The collection includes homages to her own teachers, and concludes with a sequence lovingly written for her young son… This is a playful yet moving collection…” – Mary Jean Chan, The Guardian, best recent poetry

“Hannah Lowe’s The Kids combines formal skill with a rare bravery, and bears a lightness of touch that is often virtuosic. This book of sonnets is deeply enjoyable to read… The sequencing of the sonnets is brilliant, so that the book unfolds and deepens with every new page.” – Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times

CaROLINE BIRD

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics. Her sixth and most recent Carcanet collection, The Air Year, was published in February 2020 and won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. 

Her 2017 collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010.

“Her phrasemaking is sublime… it’s superb” – Tristram Fane Saunders, February Telegraph Book of the Month 2020