Author, environmental activist and multimedia artist born in Qaqortoq (Greenland) in 1970.
Lana Hansen was born in 1970 in Qaqortoq, in southern Greenland, into an Inuit family. As a child, she was surrounded by Greenlandic myths and legends, which she was taught both at school and at home: her mother told her the legend of Inuit sea goddess Sedna; and she was inspired by the tales and songs of Ajarsivasik (literally: “the nice fat aunt”), a famous storyteller from her region. Lana Hansen began writing poems and stories in childhood; she admired the work of other Greenlandic authors such as Hans Lynge and Ole Korneliussen.
As a young adult, Lana Hansen lived in Nuuk, where she worked as an artist and independent cultural worker while also launching a literary career. In 1992, Ornigisaq, her first children’s book, containing poems and short stories, was published by Atuakkiorfik. At the end of the 2000s, Lana Hansen was involved in several projects tackling the protection of the environment and climate change. During the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen (Denmark), she presented a sound and visual installation entitled Ego White Off; the installation consisted of a film about climate change in Greenland projected onto the stretched canvas of a traditional Inuit drum.
In 2009, Lana Hansen combined writing and environmental activism with the publication of her children’s story Sila by Milik Publishers. The book was published in Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) under the title Sila : silap pissusiata allanngornera pillugu oqaluttualiaq and in Danish under the title Sila - et eventyr om klimaforandringer. Milik also published an English translation, Sila: a fable about climate change, the same year. This short story, illustrated by Greenlandic artist, novelist, and musician Georg Olsen, approaches the issue of climate change through a rewriting of the Sedna myth. Tulugaq (“Raven” in Kalaallisut) is a young boy who can turn into a raven. He is asked by the Spirit of the Greenland ice sheet to intercede with Sedna and save humanity from itself. Lana Hansen was inspired to write this story by a revelation which came to her on a Nuuk beach, where she was rambling with her daughter Niini Malu Hansen, to whom she later dedicated Sila: an eagle, devouring a lamb’s eyes, enjoined her through its penetrating gaze to warn future generations of the dangers of global warming.
Sila allowed Lana Hansen to express her great concern about the future of the planet and of Inuit societies, who, according to her, are not sufficiently aware of the climate emergency, since they associate their independence with their country’s industrial development. Sila received recognition at the international level: in 2010, the book was nominated for the West Nordic Council’s Children and Youth Literature Prize. Lana Hansen also promoted Sila at Expo 2010 in Shanghai (China), where she led a delegation of three Greenlandic artists, and at various conferences on climate change.
Political recognition has brought literary consecration across circumpolar countries for Lana Hansen, including during Nordic Library Week 2013, an event held in Scandinavian and Baltic states. New translations of Sila followed: the book was reprinted in Kalaallisut in 2016, then translated into Northern Sámi in Norway in 2017 under the title Sila muitalus dálkkádatnuppástusaid. In 2020, Lisa Qiluqqi Koperqualuk translated Sila into Inuktitut under the title ᓯᓚ. ᑲᓛᓪᓖᑦ ᐅᓂᒃᑳᑐᐊᖓ ᓯᓚᕐᔪᐊᒥ ᓯᓚᐅᑉ ᐊᓯᔾᔨᐸᓪᓕᐊᓂᖓᓄᐊᖓᔪᖅ; it became the first literary work to be translated from one Inuit language into another. A translation into French, entitled Sila, un conte groenlandais sur les changements climatiques, was published in 2020 in the “Jardin de givre” series of the Presses de l’Université du Québec, with an introduction by Daniel Chartier.
Sila has made Lana Hansen an internationally recognized ambassador for climate action; she has been involved in conferences and workshops on a global scale on behalf of both Greenland and Denmark. Lana Hansen moved to Copenhagen in 2010, then to Berlin (Germany) a few years later, where she is currently working on further literary and artistic projects.
In 2022, she publishes a collection of ecological poetry, titled in its bilingual Greenlandic and Danish version Assigiippugut / Vi er ens and in its Greenlandic and English version, Assigiippugut / We are all the same. The book is illustrated by Helle Vibeke Jensen.
Lana Hansen may have inspired her daughter to take up the cause of defending and promoting Arctic interests: Niini Malu Hansen is now a graduate student in Greenlandic studies at the University of Copenhagen and a member of JONAA’s (Journal of the North Atlantic and Arctic) editorial board, an online platform which acts as a hub for information on circumpolar and Arctic countries.