Jordan Tannahill is a Queer Canadian author, playwright, filmmaker, and theatre director. Tannahill has written over 10 plays and novels; both fiction and non-fiction. Tannahill is the recipient of two Governor General's Literary Awards.
"In 2010 [he] went to a party thrown at the real Concord Floral, an abandoned greenhouse in Vaughan, a suburb north of Toronto. [He] was 22 at the time and the greenhouse reminded [him] so much of the spaces [he'd] hung-out in while a teenager in suburban Ottawa. It made [him] think about how adolescents reclaim disused spaces in their suburbs as sites of refuge, ritual and coming-of-age. Around that time, [he] stumbled upon Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a 14th century allegory about a group of ten teenagers who flee plague-ridden Florence and shelter in an abandoned villa—it’s one of the first Western literary works that deals with adolescence as an age distinct from childhood and adulthood. Finding that text was a light-bulb moment which re-framed the teenage impulse to escape as something of a timeless myth."
Tannahill's passion is to emphasize queer identities and experiences. In 2019, CBS Arts named Jordan Tannahill one of 69 Canadians to shape the country's LGBTQ+ history.
"In 2010 [he] went to a party thrown at the real Concord Floral, an abandoned greenhouse in Vaughan, a suburb north of Toronto. [He] was 22 at the time and the greenhouse reminded [him] so much of the spaces [he'd] hung-out in while a teenager in suburban Ottawa. It made [him] think about how adolescents reclaim disused spaces in their suburbs as sites of refuge, ritual and coming-of-age. Around that time, [he] stumbled upon Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a 14th century allegory about a group of ten teenagers who flee plague-ridden Florence and shelter in an abandoned villa—it’s one of the first Western literary works that deals with adolescence as an age distinct from childhood and adulthood. Finding that text was a light-bulb moment which re-framed the teenage impulse to escape as something of a timeless myth."
Tannahill's passion is to emphasize queer identities and experiences. In 2019, CBS Arts named Jordan Tannahill one of 69 Canadians to shape the country's LGBTQ+ history.