Hana Loftus grew up in east Suffolk and, after spells in London and rural Alabama, has lived in north Essex for the last seventeen years. She is a planner and designer, co-directing an award-winning architecture practice focusing mainly on projects in East Anglian communities. Her writing has been published in journals including Apollo and Icon as well as architecture and planning journals, and she has contributed to a number of books, including most recently Common Treasures, an anthology of essays about the challenges faced by rural communities, published by Little Toller. As an artist she has been commissioned for a major new work drawing on the documentation that is the source material for Sixteen Acres, at Firstsite in Colchester. In 2025 she was runner-up in the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize.