Hannah Lowe has won the overall £30,000 Costa book of the year award for her poetry collection The Kids, it was announced on Tuesday night. The chair of judges, BBC news journalist Reeta Chakrabarti, described it as “a book to fall in love with – it’s joyous, it’s warm and it’s completely universal. It’s crafted and skilful but also accessible.” The Kids, Lowe’s third collection, which was also shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, is a book of sonnets about teaching, learning, growing up and parenthood. It had previously won the Costa poetry award category, announced on 4 January.

The Costa poetry judges, Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig and Maya Jaggi, described it as “the real deal. A page turner about the experience of teaching and being taught, it made us want to punch the air with joy ... A contemporary book that buzzes with life while re-energising the sonnet that Shakespeare would recognise. All readers will find something of themselves here.”

Speaking at Tuesday night’s awards ceremony, Lowe said she was feeling “joy, squared … the book is very much a love song to young people and to the kids that I taught, who taught me so much. It’s also a book about my teachers, and again, my deep appreciation and thanks to everyone that’s taught me in my formal and informal education.” She also thanked “my little boy, Rory, who is “learning about the world and teaching me every day, and is the absolute heart of this book”.

Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of the book of  sonnets are fictionalised portraits of ‘The Kids’, the students she nurtured. The poems also meet  her own child self in the 1980s and 90s, and later bear witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London. Her previous two Bloodaxe collections are Chick (2014), winner of the 2015 Michael Murphy prize, and Chan (2016).