Kerry Hudson at the Oxford Literary Festival

Posted on April 16, 2019 in Oxford

On the Friday night of the Oxford Literary Festival, I went to see Kerry Hudson speak about her upcoming memoir Lowborn, in which she recounts her working-class upbringing and revisits the towns where that cycle of poverty is repeated today.

As someone who has read neither of Hudson’s two published novels, I was drawn to the event purely by my interactions with her on Twitter (@ThatKerryHudson), where she is fervent in her advocacy for equality and inclusion, in the publishing industry and beyond.

All this passion came across just as clearly in person. To write Lowborn, Hudson travelled the route her family took when she was a child, as they moved around the country. She interviewed current inhabitants in the places where she used to live and investigated her own past too. She spoke about the responsibility she felt to be as accurate as possible, and her consciousness that some stories from her past were not hers to tell.

While being considerate of others was thus a priority, Hudson was entirely resolute that these working-class stories need to be told. As someone qualified to talk about these things, she stressed her duty to others who had ‘lived that story too’, and how she wrote the book for these people. However, she also indicated that, in the process of writing the book, she was able to learn and accept a lot about her own past. Finally, she expressed her wish that privileged people would also buy the book and glean from it a better understanding of the barriers faced by working-class people.

Hudson is running the Breakthrough festival for marginalised writers on June 29^th, which is free to attend. Lowborn will be available for purchase from 16^th May in the UK.

By Elizabeth Matthams