Winner of the Kerry Schooley Award — Hamilton Literary Awards

Whether it is the roads that weave through his native Hamilton, or the crowded streets of Cairo where tourists, it seems, are forbidden to walk, Pannell captures the hum and energy that animates these urban spaces in his latest collection. With an eye for the unexpected and genuine understanding of the common man, Pannell crosses and recrosses the city with his deft lines. In the end, The Nervous City walks the reader down streets they thought they knew but now see in a completely different light.

Chris Pannell has lived in Hamilton since 1988. He has published six previous books of poetry; A Nervous City (2013) won the Kerry Schooley Book Award from the Hamilton Arts Council. His last book, Love, Despite the Ache (2016), won Poetry Book of the Year from HAC. Drive (released in 2009) won the People’s Poetry Award the following year. Pannell is also the author of a set of three poetry broadsheets, which won the Hamilton and Region Arts Council Award in 1997.

He is a former DARTS bus driver, a former technical writer, and has hosted and helped run the Lit Live Reading Series in Hamilton for twenty years. Between 2015 and 2017 he edited the US academic journal The Oxfordian, an annual publication of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, which encourages discussion of the Shakespeare Authorship Question. From 1993 to 2005 he ran the new writing workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. and edited two book-length anthologies for the group.

Chris Pannell's profile page

"It may be gritty, and at times dark, but it's Pannell's ability to infuse moments of light that makes the collection shine." - Hamilton Magazine