Jordan Tannahill

Jordan Tannahill (born May 19, 1988) is a Canadian author, playwright, filmmaker, and theatre director.
His novels and plays have been translated into twelve languages, and honoured with a number of prizes including two Governor General's Literary Awards. His debut novel, Liminal, was honoured with France's 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires. His second novel, The Listeners, made the Canadian fiction bestsellers list, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize. The Listeners was adapted into a limited series, directed by Janicza Bravo, for the BBC.
Tannahill has been described as "the enfant terrible of Canadian Theatre" by Libération and The Walrus, "one of Canada's most extraordinary artists" by CBC Arts, and "widely celebrated as one of Canada's most accomplished young playwrights, filmmakers and all-round multidisciplinary artists" by the Toronto Star. In 2019, CBC Arts named Tannahill as one of sixty-nine LGBTQ Canadians, living or deceased, who has shaped the country's history.
Tannahill was born and raised in Ottawa, where he attended Canterbury High School. He moved to Toronto at the age of eighteen, and began making short films and staging experimental plays, often with non-traditional collaborators like night-shift workers, frat boys, preteens, and employees of Toronto's famed Honest Ed's discount emporium. In his early twenties, he made several photographic and video works with artist Nina Arsenault. After living in Toronto for ten years, Tannahill moved to London in 2016, where he became active in the city's kink scene.
In 2012, Tannahill and his then-boyfriend William Ellis founded and ran Videofag, an alternative arts space operated out of a defunct barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market. The space doubled as the couple's home and became an influential hub for counterculture in the city, until its closure in 2016.
Tannahill's debut novel, Liminal, published in 2018, is a work of autofiction which follows the author as he reckons with the nature of consciousness and the abject, precipitated by the sight of his mother's sleeping - or possibly dead - body. In her review of the novel, Martha Schabas of The Globe and Mail wrote "Tannahill's lushly intelligent debut... captures something illuminating and undefinable about the present moment; it speaks in the code and cadences of the late 2010s and paints an incisive portrait of the demographic we call millennial", and compared it to the work of authors Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard. In Le Devoir, Anne-Frédérique Hébert-Dolbec called the novel "a prodigious odyssey that tests the limits of reason and materiality." Liminal won the 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires.
The Listeners, published in 2021, follows Claire Devon, a woman whose life and beliefs are irrevocably altered after she starts hearing The Hum. The book made the Canadian national bestsellers list, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize. In their citation, the Giller jury called the novel "a masterful interrogation of the body, as well as the desperate violence that undergirds our lives in the era of social media, conspiracies, isolation and environmental degradation."
The Listeners was originally written as a story for a new opera by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, which premiered at the Norwegian National Opera in 2022, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Reviewing the production at Opera Philadelphia in 2024, Zachary Woolfe in The New York Times called The Listeners "the unmissable opera of the season", while Alex Ross of The New Yorker called it "mesmerizing" and declared Mazzoli "a once-in-a-generation magician of the orchestra."
Tannahill adapted his novel into a limited series, produced by Element Pictures for the BBC, directed by Janicza Bravo and starring Rebecca Hall. The series premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, and aired to critical acclaim on BBC on November 19, 2024.
Tannahill is a regular contributor to Butt (magazine), and has both written and spoken openly about his experiences with escorting and kink.
Tannahill's book of essays on theatre, Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama, first published in 2015, was called "essential reading for anybody interested in the state of contemporary theatre and performance" by The Globe and Mail. In 2022, Playbill listed the book as one of fourteen essential books for theatre students.
Tannahill's plays frequently explore the nature of belief, queer identity, power relations, and the body as a political subject. His work has been performed across North America and Europe, particularly in Germany, where several of his plays are in state theater repertory.
Tannahill's first collection of plays, Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays, was published in 2014 and received Canada's Governor General's Award for English-language drama. The collection features three plays for solo performers: Get Yourself Home Skyler James, the true story of a young female soldier who deserts the American military, the live-streamed monologue rihannaboi95, about the fallout from a queer teenager's viral video, and Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes, which imagines the final hour in the life of Peter Fechter, an adolescent from East Berlin shot while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 1962.
Tannahill's play Late Company, about two sets of parents seeking closure after a tragedy involving their sons, premiered in Toronto in 2014, and went on to receive multiple productions across Canada, and abroad. In 2017, the Finborough Theatre production of Late Company transferred to the Trafalgar Theatre on London's West End. The play's Polish translation has been running in repertory at Juliusz Słowacki Theatre since 2021.
Concord Floral, a play written by Tannahill, and developed and directed by Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner over a three-year process involving Toronto-area teenagers, is a reimagining of Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron as a contemporary suburban ghost story. The play was called “easily the best new play of the year” by J. Kelly Nestruck of The Globe and Mail when it premiered in 2014 at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, and went on to receive productions in translation around the world, at theatres including the Volkstheater, Vienna and the Deutsches Theater (Berlin). Concord Floral was a finalist for the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language drama, and won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for 'Outstanding New Play'.
Tannahill premiered a double-bill of plays, Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom in 2016 at Canadian Stage in Toronto. The first play, Botticelli in the Fire, is a queer reimagining of the events leading up to the bonfire of the vanities in 1497 Florence, while the second play, Sunday in Sodom, is a retelling of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from the perspective of Lot's wife. The plays won the 2018 Governor General's Award for English-language drama, and went on to receive several international productions, including at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC and the Hampstead Theatre in London.
Tannahill's play Declarations premiered in 2018 at Canadian Stage in Toronto, and was later presented at the 2021 Festival TransAmériques in Montreal. The fragmentary and lyrical play, inspired by the terminal illness of the playwright's mother, was described by Karen Fricker of The Toronto Star as "a devastating but joyous statement about life and grief." Critic José Teodoro wrote in the Literary Review of Canada, "the way Declarations is structured, the musical feeling of it, the way elements accumulate and unify, then splinter off, plays as something closer to what is called 'systems music' as exemplified by modern composers such as Steve Reich."
Tannahill's virtual reality performance Draw Me Close, co-produced by London's National Theatre and the National Film Board of Canada, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, and in a longer iteration at the Venice Biennale's inaugural extended reality section, Venice Immersive. The piece, which featured a pioneering fusion of live performance, motion capture technology, virtual reality, and animation, had runs at London's Young Vic Theatre in 2019, and Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre in 2021.
Commissioned by Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Theater der Welt, Is My Microphone On? is a performance text for an ensemble of young performers who speak directly to the adult audience about their inheritance of a broken political system, and a climate in crisis. Developed and directed by Erin Brubacher, in collaboration with ensembles of teenagers from Düsseldorf and Toronto, the play premiered at the 2022 Theater der Welt, before productions in Canada, Germany, Sweden, and as part of the 2023 National Theatre Connections festival in London. The play was a finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for English-language drama.
It was announced by Playbill in 2024 that Tannahill's play Prince Faggot will have its world premiere Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, in a co-production with Soho Rep, in spring 2025.
Tannahill's work in contemporary dance includes choreographing and performing with Christopher House in Marienbad for the Toronto Dance Theatre in 2016; and writing the text for Xenos in 2018, and Outwitting the Devil in 2019, two shows by choreographer Akram Khan, which have toured internationally to venues including Sadler's Wells Theatre, Festival d'Avignon, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Now (newspaper) listed both Marienbad and Xenos as Top 10 dance shows of the 2010s decade.
Tannahill's production of Sheila Heti's play All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, which he directed with frequent collaborator Erin Brubacher, premiered in 2014 at Videofag, more than a decade after Heti first began the script. Heti's struggle to write the play is one of the central plot-lines in her bestselling novel How Should a Person Be?. The production, which featured original songs by Dan Bejar, was remounted at The Kitchen in New York City in 2015.
On November 23, 2018, Tannahill, a resident of Budapest at the time, read the entirety of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble over nine hours outside the Hungarian Parliament Building in protest of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's decision to revoke accreditation and funding for gender studies programs in the country.
On April 4, 2019, Tannahill and three collaborators staged a protest action during high tea at The Dorchester Hotel. The action was in response to Brunei's proposed introduction of laws that would make homosexual sex and adultery punishable by stoning to death. The Dorchester Collection is a luxury hotel operator owned by the Brunei Investment Agency. Video documentation of the protest action, and Tannahill's forceful removal from the hotel, went viral soon after it was posted online.
Tannahill married actor Brandon Flynn in October 2024.