Books
My Child, the Algorithm (2023)
An alternatively intelligent book of love
Out now from Footnote Press
A living exploration of undoing and redoing queer single parenting and love, in conversation with an AI algorithm and a toddler.
As Hannah Silva navigates friendship, dating and life as a queer single parent in London, her toddler and the algorithm contribute humour, play and insight. With the help/disruption of these unreliable narrators, Hannah deconstructs her story, and constructs a new one. She unravels everything she has been taught to want, finding alternative ways of thinking, loving and parenting today.
Queer, creative, sexy and compassionate, My Child, the Algorithm is non-fiction at its finest.
Raises the stakes for the rest of us writers
Isabel Waidner
An important new talent
Fiona Shaw
Bold and inventive ... I loved it
Irenosen Okojie
Silva’s book asks all the right questions
Joanna Walsh
Curious, queer, whip-smart, hilarious and tender
Gail McConell
Forms of Protest (2013)
Debut poetry collection
Silva reads from Forms of Protest
Highly Commended in the 2014 Forward Prizes.
Forms of Protest collects together for the first time the work of Hannah Silva, a poet and playwright known for her fearless and wholly original vocal performances. These poems and experimental texts oscillate between sense and nonsense, meaning and music, always testing the limits of language to represent the lived world. Words are felt both as arbitrary signs and as urgent physiological acts. Ranging in form from sound poems to collaged spam email, from monologues to lists of insults, and embracing subjects as diverse as war, sexuality and giant squid, Silva's poetry is like nothing else you've read. Deconstructing the defunct languages of political and literary discourse, Forms of Protest claims a new space, a liminal zone between things as they sound - and things as they are.
An exciting, enraged debut: you can feel the blood pulsing
John Field