Poet
Philip Nanton is an Honorary Research Associate of the University of Birmingham. He was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and studied and lived in Britain from 1960 to 2000. Since 2000, he has lived in Barbados. His career began in British local government policymaking and, after completing his D.Phil at the University of Sussex (1986), he combined the world of a practicing academic with that of a creative writer. He has published reviews of contemporary Caribbean literature in journals and magazines including Caribbean Review of Books, Shibboleths and Caribbean Quarterly. He has more recently developed as a writer of humour and as a spoken word performer. In 2008 he released a CD, Island Voices from St. Christopher and the Barracudas; the book based on the CD was published in 2014 by Papillote Press. He has performed sketches from this collection across the Caribbean from Guyana to Jamaica. His second collection of sketches and poetry, Canouan Suite and Other Pieces (Papillote Press, 2016) was highly recommended in the 2018 Cuban Casa de las Americas Awards for Anglophone Caribbean Literature. In 2017, he published Frontiers of the Caribbean (Manchester University Press). He is presently writing a biography of the jazz musician and poet Shake Keane.