Hannah Silva
HANNAH SILVA is a writer and performer confronting big ideas through formal innovation and a seriously playful approach to language and technology. Their work spans BBC radio dramas—winning the Tinniswood Award for best script—and two decades of critically acclaimed poetry and performance.
Their sound poetry album 'Talk in a bit' was among The Wire's top 25 albums of 2016. Their latest book, My Child, the Algorithm (Footnote Press UK/Softskull Press North America), weaves memoir and fiction through conversations with a toddler and an early open source language model, exploring queer single parenting and love. It was named one of Granta's Books of the Year 2023.
Most recently, an extract from Silva's current writing on housing and universal credit earned a place on the 2024 Orwell Prize shortlist for Reporting Homelessness.
HANNAH SILVA is a writer and performer confronting big ideas through formal innovation and a seriously playful approach to language and technology. Their work spans BBC radio dramas—winning the Tinniswood Award for best script—and two decades of critically acclaimed poetry and performance.
Their sound poetry album 'Talk in a bit' was among The Wire's top 25 albums of 2016. Their latest book, My Child, the Algorithm (Footnote Press UK/Softskull Press North America), weaves memoir and fiction through conversations with a toddler and an early open source language model, exploring queer single parenting and love. It was named one of Granta's Books of the Year 2023.
Most recently, an extract from Silva's current writing on housing and universal credit earned a place on the 2024 Orwell Prize shortlist for Reporting Homelessness.
In a brilliant non-fiction offering, Silva uses AI to deconstruct standard narratives and construct a new, more unexpected one. It's a warm embrace of a book, which may sound odd for a work about AI, yet it's by turns funny, vulnerable and illuminating.
A striking reflection on the intersection of queer single parenthood and AI . . . curious, intelligent, propulsive, and memorable.... Silva is a playful theorist with an elastic intellect.
Hannah Silva's My Child, the Algorithm, is one of the best books I read this year. She has created a new genre of personal narrative, and a story whose grief, hope and curiosity takes on poetic, spiritual dimensions, even when exploring the most common chambers of the human heart.
Silva wonders if she is losing her identity as a writer in the same way she has often lost herself in motherhood and in love. Yet she's having fun, relishing the magic and the madness, just as she does in her human relationships.
Hannah breaks all the rules in order to refresh our minds. No writer I know in drama is as brave or as vulnerable. She talks to another hinterland of the mind. She writes like she is climbing a mountain naked… an important new talent.
Silva uses techniques like cut-up and collage, sound poetry and physical theatre to create something that's unique but nods to older forms like shamanism, pre-religious ceremonies, Dadaism, and the kind of games that children play with language.