Hanan Issa is the National Poet of Wales 2022-25. Hanan is a Welsh-Iraqi poet, filmmaker and artist from Cardiff. Her recent works include her poetry collection My Body Can House Two Hearts (Burning Eye Books, 2019) and her contributions to Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales (Repeater Books, 2022) and The Mab (Unbound, 2022), a retelling of the Mabinogi stories for children.
Her work has been performed and published on platforms such as BBC Wales, ITV Wales, Huffington Post, StAnza Festival, Poetry Wales, Y Stamp, Wales Arts Review, Wales Arts International and the British Council. Hanan co-founded the Cardiff open-mic night Where I’m Coming From. She was also a member of the first cohort of writers who took part in Literature Wales’ Representing Wales programme in 2021.
