Leila Lois

Leila Lois is a woman of Kurdish and Celtic heritage who has lived most of her life in Aotearoa. Her Kurdish ancestors fled oppression in Iraq in the seventies and her parents moved from London to Aotearoa soon after she was born.She has been living in Naarm since 2018, working as is a dance educator during the day and practising choreography and writing in her free time. Leila has read and written poetry from a young age, loving the way landscape, emotion and memory is distilled in few words. In her poems, Leila explores a personal sense of origin that, like the ocean, binds several landscapes and times, coming back to the idea that a timeless, boundless love pervades through the land.