Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the LRB, and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is his first original book.
'Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your coat, and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century's worth of adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature.' - Lucy Sante, author of The Other Paris 'Ian Penman - critic, essayist, mystical hack and charmer of sentences like they're snakes - is the writer I have hardly gone a week without reading, reciting, summoning to mind. The writer without whom, etc.' - Brian Dillon, author of Affinities