Ian Penman

Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors won the 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Iwas​ still half asleep when I heard the story on an early morning TV show one day in April. It was so odd I wondered later if I had dreamed it. But it was true: government authorities in Chechnya had imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too...

Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy. 

A kind of transcendence is often demanded of Black voices, as singers or as political orators: the kind of voice that fills the heart, fills the hall, embraces the land. There’s an unspoken expectation that such voices gift us some exalted truth. But quieter, weaker voices can ruffle our feathers too. Maybe they chime with the murky or tattered voices in our own psychical crypts. They seem to befall us.

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

The rubble had been cleared away, but strange grasses and wild herbs had sprung up where the war-demolished houses had been.

Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

Onthe opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’...

Vorsprung durch Techno

Ian Penman, 10 September 2020

Kraftwerk performing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin on 16 January 2015

Inthe autumn of 1977, sober-suited Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider of the German synthesiser group Kraftwerk entered a New York nightclub and were surprised to hear an apparently endless version of a track from their newly released album Trans-Europe Express. Hütter was at first delighted to hear...

Fassbinder predicted a world of ubiquitous screens. He was flamboyantly gay, proudly ugly, extremely left-wing, outrageously productive and had an astonishing eye. It’s easy to imagine him, if he’d...

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Secretly Sublime: The Great Ian Penman

Iain Sinclair, 19 March 1998

One of the myths that fuzzes the shadowy outline of Ian Penman, a laureate of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s

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