Hannah Moscovitch

Hannah Moscovitch (born June 5, 1978) is a Canadian playwright, screenwriter, and executive producer who rose to national prominence in the 2000s. She is best known for her plays East of Berlin, This Is War, "Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story", and Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, for which she received the 2021 Governor General's Award for English-language drama.

Early life and education Born in Ottawa, Moscovitch is currently based in Toronto and Halifax. Her father, Allan Moscovitch, is a social policy professor at Carleton University. Her mother, Julie White, is a labour researcher. Both have long been active in left wing politics. Moscovitch's father is Jewish, of Romanian and Ukrainian background, while her mother is from a Christian background (of English and Irish ancestry). Moscovitch was "raised as an atheist", and has said that there is "implicitly Jewish sensibility" to her plays. She studied at the National Theatre School in the acting stream.

Career Playwright

Moscovitch gained considerable notice for two short plays written for Toronto's SummerWorks. In 2005, she presented Essay, a play about gender politics in modern academia. The next year at the festival The Russian Play premiered, a romance set in Stalinist Russia. Both were well received by critics and audiences. In 2007, her first full-length play, East of Berlin, premiered at the Tarragon Theatre. The play focuses on the legacy of the Holocaust on the children of those involved. The main character is the son of a Nazi war criminal who grows up in Paraguay. He eventually travels to Berlin and meets the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor. The play was acclaimed for its complex subject, humour, and characters and was also a popular success, returning to Tarragon in winter 2009 and 2010.

2013 saw the premiere of This Is War, a play depicting the lives of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. This Is War won multiple awards with one reviewer writing "Moscovitch shines a light on massive issues like sexual harassment within the military without making her play a morality tale or exposé. It’s a story about four good people in a bad place and all the gray area that that produces." In 2015, Moscovitch wrote the play Infinity about a physicist who becomes involved in a love story while contemplating the nature of time. She collaborated with Lee Smolin to lend verisimilitude to some of the theoretical ideas.

Moscovitch's plays have been widely produced across Canada, including at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company, The National Arts Centre, Toronto's Factory Theatre, Edmonton's Theatre Network, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, Vancouver's Firehall Arts Centre, the Alberta Theatre Projects, and Montreal's Imago Theatre. Moscovitch is currently playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre and was previously a contributing writer to the CBC radio drama series Afghanada (2006-2011).

Since 2021, Moscovitch has been a writer for the AMC series Interview with the Vampire and was an executive producer for its third season, The Vampire Lestat. On 24 July 2026, AMC announced the renewal of the show for a fourth season titled Queen of the Damned, for which Moscovitch will serve as showrunner.

Works

Plays Essay – 2005 The Russian Play – 2006 East of Berlin – 2007 In This World – 2008 The Children's Republic – 2009 Little One – 2011 Other People's Children – 2012 This Is War – 2012 I Have no Stories to Tell You – 2013 Infinity – 2014 What a Young Wife Ought To Know – 2015 The Kaufman Cabaret - 2016 - Commissioned by the University of Alberta Bunny – 2016 Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story - 2017 Secret Life of a Mother - 2018 Sky on Swings - 2019 Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes - 2020 Post-Democracy - 2021 Fall On Your Knees (adaptation) - 2023

Television

Awards and honours Moscovitch won Dora Mavor Moore Awards for In This World (2010) and "Infinity" (2015). She won both the Trillium Book Award and Toronto Critic's Awards in 2014 for This Is War. She has won the Nova Scotia Masterworks Award for "Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story", and the SummerWorks Prize for Best Production for The Russian Play.

She received the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (2016) in the Drama category, becoming the first Canadian woman to win the prize.

She was the winner of the Governor General's Award for English-language drama at the 2021 Governor General's Awards for her play Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes.

Award nominations received by Moscovitch include the Siminovitch Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Carol Bolt Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the KM Hunter Award and the Toronto Arts Council Foundation Emerging Artist Award.