Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are fictionalised portraits of 'The Kids', the students she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London.

Across these deeply felt poems, Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour. Social class, gender and race - and their fundamental intersection with education - are investigated with an ever critical and introspective eye. 

The Kids won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award, is a Poetry Book Society Choice and is shortlisted the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.