Jordan Tannahill – författare

Now a major BBC drama starring Rebecca Hall ‘Starts as a little hum in your ears, ends up blowing the top off your head’ EMMA DONOGHUE ‘A page-turning unravelling of a family’ ZOE WHITTALL 'Fans of The Power will love this addictive novel’ Stylist A stunning, propulsive novel following one woman as she treads the fine lines between faith, conspiracy and mania. While lying in bed next to her husband one night, Claire Devon hears a low hum that he cannot detect. And, it seems, no one else can either. This innocuous noise begins causing Claire headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia, gradually upsetting the balance of her life, though no obvious source or medical cause can be found.When Claire discovers that a student of hers can also hear the hum, she and the boy strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours who can also pick up the sound. What starts as a neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something far more extreme and with far-reaching, devastating consequences for all of them.The Listeners is a gripping, exhilarating novel exploring the seductive pull of the unknown, the rise of online conspiracy culture and the desire for community and connection in our increasingly polarised times.‘One of those rare novels that entered my soul … Tannahill writes with the heat and wisdom of a god’ CLAUDIA DEY, author of Heartbreaker‘Fantastic on conspiracy theories, cults, faith and mania’ Daily Mail‘Breathtakingly, breath-holdingly good’ IAN WILLIAMS, author of Reproduction

‘Belongs in the firmament of great gay fiction’ DOUGLAS STUART‘Beautiful, hugely ambitious’ GARTH GREENWELL‘A slim, hypnotic novel’ TASH AW The stunning new novel from Jordan Tannahill, acclaimed author of The Listeners, follows a British expat in Berlin who begins to see his dead lovers at a cruising lake on the outskirts of the city. While cruising one evening by Teufelssee, a small glacial lake in the Grunewald forest on the edge of Berlin, a man spots a handsome stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to his former lover. Only, Lukas died nearly thirty years ago. Yet the man cannot shake the feeling that it was really Lukas he saw.Over the course of one long, hot summer with friends and lovers at the lake, this first sighting sets off a string of strange encounters. As the man learns more of Teufelssee, he finds himself venturing deeper into the mystery of the surrounding forest. He begins to wonder if these meetings are real or imagined, if they take place in the past or the present, and what they might reveal about the nature of time itself and his place within its flow.Part ghost story, part love story, this ecstatic, sexy and exquisitely written novel offers an elegy to the ways our lives become entangled with history, the natural world and those we love.‘At once an unflinchingly beautiful novel about queer desire, summer days, and casual sex, that is also an elegy to friendship, grief, and lovers lost’ DOUGLAS STUART, author of John of John‘The Living Realm is a novel that rises to its subject: the whole of life’ GARTH GREENWELL, author of Small Rain

‘Belongs in the firmament of great gay fiction’ DOUGLAS STUART‘Beautiful, hugely ambitious’ GARTH GREENWELL‘A slim, hypnotic novel’ TASH AW The stunning new novel from Jordan Tannahill, acclaimed author of The Listeners, follows a British expat in Berlin who begins to see his dead lovers at a cruising lake on the outskirts of the city. While cruising one evening by Teufelssee, a small glacial lake in the Grunewald forest on the edge of Berlin, a man spots a handsome stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to his former lover. Only, Lukas died nearly thirty years ago. Yet the man cannot shake the feeling that it was really Lukas he saw.Over the course of one long, hot summer with friends and lovers at the lake, this first sighting sets off a string of strange encounters. As the man learns more of Teufelssee, he finds himself venturing deeper into the mystery of the surrounding forest. He begins to wonder if these meetings are real or imagined, if they take place in the past or the present, and what they might reveal about the nature of time itself and his place within its flow.Part ghost story, part love story, this ecstatic, sexy and exquisitely written novel offers an elegy to the ways our lives become entangled with history, the natural world and those we love.‘At once an unflinchingly beautiful novel about queer desire, summer days, and casual sex, that is also an elegy to friendship, grief, and lovers lost’ DOUGLAS STUART, author of John of John‘The Living Realm is a novel that rises to its subject: the whole of life’ GARTH GREENWELL, author of Small Rain

They're going to kill you. They're going to worship you, don't get me wrong. But they are going to kill you.Playboy Sandro Botticelli has it all: talent, fame, good looks. He also has the ear - and the wife - of Lorenzo de Medici, as well as the Florence's hottest young apprentice, Leonardo.But whilst he is at work on his breakthrough commission, The Birth of Venus, Botticelli's devotion to pleasure and beauty is put to the ultimate test. As plague sweeps through the city, the charismatic friar Girolamo Savonarola starts to stoke the fires of dissent against the liberal elite. Botticelli finds the life he knows breaking apart, forcing him to choose between love and survival.Jordan Tannahill's hot-blooded queering of Renaissance Italy questions how much of ourselves we are willing to sacrifice when society comes off the rails.WINNER: Best New Play, Toronto Theatre Critics Award WINNER: Governor General's Literary Award Botticelli in the Fire made its European premiere at Hampstead Theatre, London, in October 2019.

National Theatre Connections 2023 draws together ten new plays for young people to perform, from some of the UK's most exciting and popular playwrights. These are plays for a generation of theatre-makers who want to ask questions, challenge assertions and test the boundaries, and for those who love to invent and imagine a world of possibilities.The plays offer young performers an engaging and diverse range of material to perform, read or study. Touching on themes like climate change, politics, toxic masculinity and gang culture, the collection provides topical, pressing subject matter for students to explore in their performance.This 2023 anthology represents the full set of ten plays offered by the National Theatre 2023 Festival, as well as comprehensive workshop notes that give insights and inspiration for building characters, running rehearsals and staging a production.

Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer-gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendence that kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between?A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form.Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination.‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom “interdisciplinary” is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’– J. Kelly Nestruck, The Globe and Mail‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’– Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)Jordan Tannahill is a playwright, theatre director, and filmmaker. His plays and short films have been presented in theatres, festivals, and galleries across Canada and internationally. He received the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for his book Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays. In collaboration with William Ellis, Jordan runs the alternative art-space Videofag, out of a defunct barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market.

'After thousands of years, I have a mouth… So if you don't mind, Mum, Dad, I'm going to speak. I'm going to shout. When I become a human I'm going to use some words. Can you still hear me? Is my microphone on?'Young people have inherited a burning world. In Jordan Tannahill's urgent and lyrical play, they reckon with the generations who have come before them, questioning the choices that have been made, and the ones that they will yet be forced to make.In Is My Microphone On? an ensemble of young performers hold the audience to account, and invite them to experience the world together anew.The play was commissioned by the Theater der Welt festival in Germany, premiered in English by Canadian Stage, Toronto, in 2021, and performed by youth theatres across the UK as part of the 2023 National Theatre Connections Festival. It offers opportunities for a large, flexible cast of any size or mix of genders, and can incorporate chorus work, movement and music.

When you wake up in a cold sweat at night and you think someone is watching you, well it's me. I'm watching you. And that cold sweat on your body, those are my tears.When the Shaun-Hastings sit down to dinner with the Dermots, closure is on the menu but recrimination becomes the main course. As their good intentions are stripped away, both couples' culpability in a tragedy is laid bare.At a dinner party where grief is the loudest guest, Late Company asks the question: How well can a parent ever know their child?Jordan Tannahill's Late Company received its European premiere at the Finborough Theatre, London, in April 2017 and transferred to the Trafalgar Studios, London, in August of the same year.

From award-winning playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill comes a masterful and moving novel in the tradition of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be.At 11:04 a.m. on January 21st, 2017, Jordan opens the door to his mother’s bedroom. As his eyes adjust to the half-light, he finds her lying in bed, eyes closed and mouth agape. In that instant he cannot tell whether she is asleep or dead. The sight of his mother's body, caught between these two possibilities, causes Jordan to plunge headlong into the uncertain depths of consciousness itself.From androids to cannibals to sex clubs, an unforgettable personal odyssey emerges, populated by a cast of sublime outsiders in search for the ever-elusive nature of self. Part ontological thriller, part millennial saga, Liminal is a riotous and moving portrait of a young man in volatile times, a generation caught in suspended animation, and a son’s enduring love for his mother.