Online Launch Reading: A Foreign Country by Nigel Pantling

Join us for an amazing evening of poetry with Nigel Pantling, who will be reading from his new collection A Foreign Country, which was published in April 2025. Hosted by Poetry Business co-directors Ann and Peter Sansom.

A Foreign Country is available to order now on The Poetry Business website: https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product/...

Use checkout code 'foreigncountry' for FREE P+P on all of Nigel's books!

In A Foreign Country, Nigel Pantling takes us to some strange places – the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past – and for each he serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey though different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.

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Nigel Pantling served as an officer in the British Army Of the Rhine during the Cold War and in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’, as a Home Office civil servant under the Thatcher Government, and as a merchant banker during the years of rampant mergers and acquisitions of the 90s. He is now a strategic adviser to company chief executives, and lives in north London. His previous poetry collections include It’s Not Personal, Hip Hind Hook and Kingdom Power Glory.
https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product-...

Tom Connolly is the author of three novels and of two non-fiction books. His debut novel The Spider Truces was a Financial Times book of the year, was shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His 2024 biography of the cyclist Alex Dowsett was shortlisted for Sports Book Awards 2024. He is also a ghostwriter of memoirs of senior leaders, and for twenty years directed television advertisements and films for charities.
https://tomconnolly.co.uk/

Ann Sansom is co-director of The Poetry Business and editor of Smith|Doorstop and The North. She is a poet, playwright and tutor. She has published six collections of poetry; had work published in several Forward/Faber anthologies, Russian Vogue and a range of other publications. She has also written and directed plays for stage and radio. Her two full-length poetry collections are published by Bloodaxe.