Hannah Silva

Hannah Silva picture

Hannah Silva is a writer and performer at the vanguard of innovative and interdisciplinary research into the creative potential and implications of generative AI.

Silva has been working with technology as a creative tool for two decades and has an international reputation as a sound poet. ‘Talk in a bit’ (Humankind Records) was included in the Wire’s Top 25 Albums of 2018.

‘An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love’ for BBC Radio 4 starred Fiona Shaw and was the starting point for My Child, the Algorithm, a memoir on queer parenting and love written in conversation with a GPT algorithm and a toddler. Silva has authored seven other plays for BBC Radio 3 and 4, won the Tinniswood Award for best script and numerous placements in the BBC Audio Drama Awards. Silva holds a PhD in the analysis of poetry in performance and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University. She/they.

Hannah Silva picture

Hannah Silva is a writer and performer at the vanguard of innovative and interdisciplinary research into the creative potential and implications of generative AI.

Silva has been working with technology as a creative tool for two decades and has an international reputation as a sound poet. ‘Talk in a bit’ (Humankind Records) was included in the Wire’s Top 25 Albums of 2018.

‘An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love’ for BBC Radio 4 starred Fiona Shaw and was the starting point for My Child, the Algorithm, a memoir on queer parenting and love written in conversation with a GPT algorithm and a toddler. Silva has authored seven other plays for BBC Radio 3 and 4, won the Tinniswood Award for best script and numerous placements in the BBC Audio Drama Awards. Silva holds a PhD in the analysis of poetry in performance and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University. She/they.

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

Fiona Shaw

This dense, complex, intelligent hour ... celebrates the slipperiness of words

Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, on Schlock!

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

Ian McMillan, The Verb, BBC Radio 3

A bold and inventive meditation on the complexities of motherhood. I loved it.

Irenosen Okojie, novelist and Women’s Prize Judge 2023 on

My Child, the Algorithm

The vocal acrobatics of musician and writer Hannah Silva test the physical limits of language

Julian Cowley, The Wire, on Talk in a bit

A work worthy to stand beside classics of queer parenting by Maggie Nelson and Gail McConnell… about art, family and love.

Joanna Walsh, author of

Girl Online

and

Break.up

on

My Child, the Algorithm