Jordan Tannahill 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 was a Canadian bestseller, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize.
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.
Early life
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 films and photographic works with artist Nina Arsenault.
Theatre and performance
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.
He received the Governor General's Award for English-language drama in 2014 for Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays, and again in 2018 for his plays Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom. He was a finalist for the award in 2016 for his play Concord Floral, and in 2023 for Is My Microphone On?. He has been nominated for five Outstanding New Play Dora Mavor Moore Awards, winning in 2013 for his live-streamed monologue rihannaboi95, and in 2015 for Concord Floral.
In 2017, Tannahill's play Late Company transferred to London's West End. In the same year, his virtual reality performance Draw Me Close, co-produced by London's National Theatre and the National Film Board of Canada, premiered at the Venice Biennale. His play for young performers, Is My Microphone On?, commissioned for the 2020 Theater der Welt festival by the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, has been translated and produced in seven countries, including as part of the 2023 National Theatre Connections festival.
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 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.
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 on theatre.
Novels
Liminal
Liminal is a work of autofiction which follows the character Jordan 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.