"Shall we start with a happy ending? I made it. I rose, I escaped poverty." So reads the opening line of Kerry Hudson’s truly remarkable memoir, Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns. In part it’s a book about that getaway, which came at the age of 19, when Hudson won a place to read Theatre Studies at university in London in 1999 and, with it, the chance to contemplate a future with "wide horizons and choices that would be mine".

Over the next two decades she travelled the world; built a successful career in the charity sector; wrote two prize-winning ...