Books

My Child, the Algorithm (2023)

An alternatively intelligent book of love

My Child, the Algorithm tells a story of finding joy after betrayal. Like a male seahorse, Hannah Silva carried a baby made from her partner's egg. But when she gave birth, her partner left, and Hannah found herself navigating life alone with her child.

Hannah started playing with a precursor to ChatGPT—wondering what AI could tell us about love. To her surprise, she was moved by the results. The algorithm prompted Hannah to share her explorations of dating, sex, friendship, and life as a queer parent in London. With the help and disruption of two unreliable narrators, a toddler and an algorithm, Hannah deconstructs her story, unraveling everything she has been taught to want, and finds alternative ways of thinking, loving, and parenting today.

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