A Conversation with Hannah Lowe
Born to an English mother and a Jamaican-Chinese father, Hannah Lowe is the author of Chick (2013), which celebrates the multicultural life of London and its environs in the 1980s and ’90s. It won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Forward, Aldeburgh, and Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prizes. She was named by Poetry Book Society as one of Twenty Next Generation Poets in 2014. Her second collection, Chan (2016), is based on her research in migration and mixed-race studies, drawing on the life of Joe Harriott, the Jamaican alto saxophonist who made his name in 1950s London, and Jamaican migrants who traveled from Kingston to Liverpool in 1947 on the SS Ormonde. She has also published a family memoir, Long Time, No See (2015), a more direct treatment of her father’s experiences, bringing a neglected chapter of multicultural London to life. She lectures in creative writing at Brunel University and is the current Poet in Residence at Keats House.
Jennifer Wong: Your home culture is a mix of different places. How do you see the meaning of home and of being away?
This story is from the March – April 1018 edition of World Literature Today.
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This story is from the March – April 1018 edition of World Literature Today.
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