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Lowborn
- Author
- Kerry Hudson
- Narrator
- Kerry Hudson
- Publisher
- Random House
- Publish Date
- 16 May 2019
- Run Time
- 8 hours 15 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Lowborn by Kerry Hudson.
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.
Critics Review
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I loved Lowborn... A powerful exploration of Hudson's working-class childhood and its legacy
David Nicholls, author of One Day
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Totally engrossing and deliciously feisty...It really brings home how under-represented working-class lives and impoverished childhoods have been in our literary culture
Bernadine Evaristo
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Hudson's resilience, grace and humility is staggering. She's an absolute inspiration
Herald
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Absolutely beautiful
Stanley Tucci
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Kerry Hudson blew me away, opened my eyes
You're Booked
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Compelling, fascinating and well-written, undeniably grim but peppered with humour and tenderness...Hudson demonstrates that only by lifting whole communities out of poverty...can we hope to avoid consigning children and young people like her - vulnerable and blameless - to the worst of lives
Daily Telegraph
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Lowborn is in part an indictment of a country that claims to still have a functioning welfare state... Most of all, it is a moving portrait of the survival and eventual flourishing of a remarkable spirit
Guardian
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I've been in thrall to the words of Kerry Hudson since reading the very first sentence of her spectacularly good debut novel. I'm so glad she is writing Lowborn. It's an important book that needs to exist and she is exactly the right person to write it. The hideous divisiveness that the horror that is Brexit has both revealed and fuelled, only makes this book more necessary
Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of THE LAST ACT OF LOVE
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Elegant, compassionate and powerful... tells the hidden story of what it means to be poor in Britain today
Sunday Express
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Lowborn is an insider's view of the complexities of modern-day poverty, written with humour and compassion, but without judgement. It should be required reading for anyone who unknowingly believes poverty is a personal choice and that if you work hard enough you'll avoid its fate... a fearless writer, an inspiring woman
Sunday Times
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Details
- Author
- Kerry Hudson
- Narrator
- Kerry Hudson
- Duration
- 8 hours 15 minutes
- Release Date
- 16 May 2019
- ISBN
- 9781473570221
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Random House
- Genre
- Memoirs, Poverty and precarity, Social and ethical issues, Autobiography: writers, Urban communities
Synopsis
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Lowborn by Kerry Hudson. 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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