Lowborn – which began as a column on the now-defunct website the Pool – is split between Hudson’s memories of her upbringing and her more recent experiences of returning to the places through which she passed.
“I can best describe this vertiginous feeling as belonging nowhere and to no one, neither ‘back there’ nor truly ‘here’.” “I find myself unable to reconcile my ‘now’ with my past,” she says. Hudson, now a successful novelist, is still deeply affected by formative years when she went to nine primary and five secondary schools. But the experience was of a piece with the chaotic, volatile nature of Hudson’s childhood: essentially a fitful trek around Scotland and England, defined by her mother’s turbulent personal life and mental instability, and a sense that there was rarely anyone around to make her life more bearable – either from the relevant authorities, or any friends and family. She also journeys into the hardest regions of her own childhood, because sometimes in order to move forwards we first have to look back.As it turned out, her mother came to get her the next day, full of hungover remorse. 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. But she often finds herself looking over her shoulder, caught somehow between two worlds.
She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books.
She's a prizewinning novelist who has travelled the world. Twenty years later, Kerry's life is unrecognisable. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor.
'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?' 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 Random House presents the audiobook edition of Lowborn by Kerry Hudson.
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