Event Description

Daylight Talks: Exploring Queer Parenthood and AI with author Hannah Silva by The Daylight Collective - Part of Daylight Sessions

A parent-accessible - Expect grown up content, but children are welcome too. You don't have to be a parent to attend - everyone is welcome.

Join author Hannah Silva for a sharing and conversation with Dr Kate Massey-Chase exploring Hannah's novel My Child, the Algorithm: An alternatively intelligent book of love. A living exploration of undoing and redoing queer single parenting and love, in conversation with an AI algorithm and a toddler. As Hannah Silva navigates friendship, dating and life as a queer single parent in London, their toddler and the algorithm contribute humour, play and insight. With the help/disruption of these unreliable narrators, Hannah deconstructs their story, and constructs a new one. They unravel everything they have been taught to want, finding alternative ways of thinking, loving and parenting today. Queer, creative, sexy and compassionate, My Child, the Algorithm is non-fiction at its finest.

"Raises the stakes for the rest of us writers" - ISABEL WAIDNER
"An important new talent" - FIONA SHAW
"Curious, queer, whip-smart, hilarious and tender" - GAIL MCCONNELL

Hannah Silva is a writer and performer working in sound poetry, radio and experimental non-fiction. Their eighth BBC radio play, “An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love” was the starting point for My Child, the Algorithm (Footnote Press/Soft Skull) – Silva’s questioning of love and queer single parenting is woven into surreal and funny contributions by a predecessor of ChatGPT, and a toddler (a Granta Book of the Year 2023). Silva’s record Talk in a bit was in the Wire’s Top 25 Albums of 2018. Their story “A Single Parent Flat Hunting on Universal Credit, London 2023” was recently shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness.

Dr. Kate Massey-Chase is a community arts facilitator, academic, activist, and writer. She’s a lecturer at Plymouth Marjon University, where she’s leading a new MA in Arts, Health and Wellbeing, as well as teaching Performing Arts and English. Kate lives in Exeter with her wife, their two children and two cats.