Ian Penman

Ian Penman is a British writer and cultural critic born in 1958, who made his name as one of the founding voices of the New Musical Express in the late 1970s and 1980s, where his writing on popular music — combining cultural theory, psychoanalysis, and lyrical criticism — was enormously influential. He subsequently wrote for The Wire, The Face, Sight & Sound, and the London Review of Books. Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors (2023, Fitzcarraldo Editions) is his first book, a formally unusual work about the West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) that is part biography, part memoir, part cultural history, and part prose poem. Structured in numbered, aphoristic fragments, it evokes post-war European cinema and counterculture while also circling around Penman's own formation as a writer and cinephile. It jointly won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography in 2023 and won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2024. Penman is known for his recondite allusions, his syntactic compression, and his ability to map cultural history through intensely personal writing. Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors was widely celebrated as an original contribution to the literature of cinema.