Hanan Issa

Hanan Issa is a Welsh-Iraqi poet, filmmaker and artist from Cardiff, who in 2022 was named the fifth National Poet of Wales. Hanan's poetry collection My Body Can House Two Hearts was published in 2019, and she has since contributed to Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales and The Mab, a retelling of the Mabinogi stories for children. She co-founded the Cardiff open-mic night Where I’m Coming From and worked in the writers’ room for Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts. Hanan was a member of the first cohort of writers who took part in Literature Wales’s Representing Wales programme in 2021.

For Spring 23, Hanan collaborated with illustrator Alex Merry to create an artwork for our poster.