The poetry collection The Kids by Jamaican-British writer Hannah Lowe was named the winner of the 2021 Costa Book of the Year Award, one of the most coveted literary honours in the United Kingdom, at a ceremony on 1 February. It comes with a prize of £30,000.
This is the second year in a row that a writer with Caribbean roots has won the award. The Kids follows in the footsteps of the novel The Mermaid of Black Conch by Trinidad-born Monique Roffey, which was named the 2020 Costa Book of the Year. (By coincidence, Roffey and Lowe also share a literary agent, Isobel Dixon of London’s Blake Friedmann Agency.)
Last year’s winners also included Love After Love by Trinidad-born Ingrid Persaud, winner of the 2020 Costa Book Award for Best First Novel. The three authors — Lowe, Roffey, and Persaud — are familiar to readers in Trinidad and Tobago, having appeared several times over the years at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.
Lowe, whose previous books were the poetry collections Chick and Chan and the memoir Long Time, No See, was a Bocas author in 2013 and 2016. At her two festival appearances at T&T’s National Library and Old Fire Station, she discussed the roots of her writing in her family experience. She is the daughter of a British mother and a Chinese-Jamaican father — the subject of her debut book.
In her NGC Bocas Lit Fest events, Lowe appeared on stage alongside authors like Roger Robinson (T.S. Eliot Prize, 2019), Vahni Capildeo (Forward Prize for Poetry, 2016), and Marlon James (Man Booker Prize, 2015) — all members of an acclaimed and extraordinarily talented Caribbean literary diaspora.
“Bringing together writers from the wide Caribbean diaspora, giving them a chance to meet readers here at home and vice versa, was one of our original goals for the festival,” says Bocas festival and programme director Nicholas Laughlin. “The Caribbean writing community is truly global. We know our writers have vital stories to tell. When they win prizes like this one, it helps make that obvious to readers everywhere.”
Lowe’s prizewinning new book, The Kids, which previously won the 2021 Costa Book Award for Poetry, is a collection of sonnets that draws on her past experience as a sixth-form teacher at an inner-city London school. “We were looking for the most enjoyable book, the most accessible book, the book that you would most want to pass on to other people,” said the chair of the Costa Book Award judges. “The winner was, for all of us, fresh and immediate, it spoke very directly to everybody.”
Inaugurated in 1971, the Costa Book Awards were long known as the Whitbread Book Awards, but renamed in 2006 when the UK company Costa Coffee assumed the sponsorship. The aim of the awards is to recognise the “most enjoyable” books published each year in the UK, in the categories First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry, and Children’s Book. The winners in the five categories then compete to be named overall Costa Book of the Year.