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When is a library a lifeline?

Kerry Hudson, author of Lowborn, tells us how libraries changed her life and can be a lifeline for communities.
7 October 2019

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Portrait of Kerry Hudson

When it is where you go to look for jobs. Or access social work services. When you apply for your benefits there. When it is the place you go for internet when everything in society requires internet access now. When you sit upright in a chair in front of a computer searching for things that make you feel more connected to a world, working or otherwise, that you’ve come to feel marginalised from.

When you are sick, in body or mind, and seeking entertainment, distraction or information or all of these things.

When you are a new parent and you know there is a free, warm, safe space to take your kids where you might even meet others going through the same as you.

When you are young and queer and struggling but find solace from the hostile outside in whole shelves of books that tell you, you exist, that it does get better. Shelves of books that show you the lives you might have where you will love and will be loved, accept and be accepted.

When you drop out of education but still want to nourish yourself. When you’re towards the end of your life and you are lonely. When your home is not a home at all. When you need to be around people and alone too. When you do not just need a book – though they can be lifesaving too – but you need a connecting line to society, a place to be quiet, a safe space.

Kerry on the Lowborn: Down the Chipper tour
Kerry on the Lowborn: Down the Chipper tour © Mark Vassey

Last year I wrote about how fundamental libraries are to a society that cares for its citizens. How they are so much more than simply places to ‘loan a book’ and how the service is slowly but efficiently being eroded despite its relative low-cost and huge benefits to communities. I wrote about how the service is cut right down to the bone and then, when the footfall drops in those under-resourced, under-staffed, libraries with their new erratic opening hours, they are said to be inessential and closed.

The problem is, as with so much of policy in the country, we are missing the humanity in evaluation that is designed only to be quantitative. It is not only about membership or footfall or even really, how many books are loaned. It is the qualitative data that is not being recorded at all that makes for the most compelling and urgent proof that libraries need to be here to stay, need to be at the heart of each and every community.

Libraries are lifelines, life savers. I know this because they saved my life. A deeply troubled queer teen who left school at 15, who had no stable support structure, a self-destructive streak and a lot of barriers in my way, but who still wanted to live a bigger life than the one expected of me. A kid who was smart but had nowhere to turn smart into a future. Nowhere, that is, except libraries, where I was always welcomed. Where no one asked anything of me. Where the books on the shelves provided portals to other worlds that might be mine if I just held on. Each time I picked up a book and read of a life that was not mine but that might be one day I was sent the message ‘keep going, don’t stop, keep hoping.’

So I did. Now I write books that sit in the same libraries that gave me life.

Lowborn has been nominated for the Books Are My Bag Breakthrough Award and longlisted for the Portico Prize.