Hannah Silva is a writer & theatre maker based in Plymouth. She performs spoken word and theatre internationally and throughout the UK. She teaches creative writing in Plymouth and is touring as a performance poet with Apples & Snakes this Autumn. For more info please see www.hannahsilva.co.uk

Nice things people have said about my work:

- David Caddy, Tears in the Fence:

Hannah’s work is continually evolving and widening its scope. Her work occupies a fascinating space that draws upon sound poetry, music and theatre. Similar to sound poets and performers in the Sixties and Seventies, her work is open, engaging, theatrical and wonderfully musical. She is able to attract and hold quite diverse audiences. In particular, she has the ability to attract those people that might not have seen such a versatile live performer. I greatly admire Hannah’s ability to develop new work, ideas and audiences. She is a rare talent.

-The Times, Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008:

Her physical performances, fast-talking delivery and innovative use of cut-up text make her one of the most ambitious and entertaining poets in the country.

- Sound and Music, Ashley Wong:

I was particularly impressed by Hannah Silva’s cut up spoken word poetry that began as a nervous introduction of herself and then spiralled into a cryptic play of words and the expression of speech by using only the same words used in her first intro. It played on the psychological understanding and meaning of tones and words spliced together almost at random and expressing something quite new.

-Baroque in Hackney, Katy Evans Bush:

It was really quite astonishing. A really good take on what the meanings are of language itself, as an entity. Her shtick was to make her own speech sound like a recording – a recording manipulated, at that. You don’t get this in the usual poetry readings I go to – not the performancey ones, either.

-Gists and Piths, Simon Turner, on Threshold:

A headon collision between Bob Cobbing and Alice Oswald. Silva’s work is extremely exciting, representing as it does a marriage of performance poetics, and more ‘academic’ tendencies in modern poetry. The results were/are invigorating.

- Jenni Doherty, Guildhall Press:
Innovative, experimental, raw, sexy, brave, original and a breath of fresh air.

- Audience members, 'boat on the water' (Plymouth 2009, commissioned by Dance-ing Devon festival):

“It was like being in a dream – I’m gutted I have to go home and do my washing now!”

“Boat on the Water was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

“Vibrant with colour and life; amazingly inventive and entirely absorbing.”
“The performers looked me in the eyes as if they’d known me for years”

“A truly brave step into alternative theatre and an experience not soon forgotten. I so enjoyed and delighted in the whole experience!”

View my website http://www.hannahsilva.wordpress.com/