Hannah Lowe was born in Ilford to an English mother and Jamaican-Chinese father. She has lived in London, Brighton and Santa Cruz, California. She studied American Literature at the University of Sussex and has a Masters degree in Refugee Studies, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University. She has worked as a teacher of literature, and is now a lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University. She has been poet in residence at Keats House, and in 2020 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.

Her pamphlet The Hitcher (The Rialto, 2011) was widely praised. Her first book-length collection Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) won the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and was selected for the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. This was followed by two pamphlets, R x (sine wave peak, 2013) and Ormonde (Hercules Editions, 2014), and her family memoir Long Time No See (Periscope, 2015).

She also read from Long Time, No See on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in 2015. Her second full-length collection, Chan, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016, followed by a pamphlet, The Neighbourhood (Out-Spoken Press) in 2019. Her third full collection, The Kids (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2021. It won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.