[7][8] Nanton's published books include Island Voices: From St Christopher to the Barracudas and Frontiers of the Caribbean (2014), Canouan Suite and Other Pieces (2016), and Riff: The Shake Keane Story (2021).
[3][9] He began his career in British local government policymaking, and completed his D.Phil at the University of Sussex (1986), following which he combined academic work with being a creative writer.
[12] In 2008, Nanton produced a spoken-word CD entitled Island Voices from St Christopher & the Barracudas, which was the basis of a 2014 book of the same name published by Papillote Press.
[3][16][17] Reviewing Riff (which Nanton dedicates to photojournalist and historian Val Wilmer), jazz critic John Fordham wrote: "Nanton is closely attuned to the expressiveness of the local Creole-derived dialect's vowel-stretches and musicality, and to those issues of migration, masculinity and nationalism that profoundly shaped his subject's life.
"[19] In 2012, Nanton's poem "Punctuation Marks" – from The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (edited by Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown, 1992) – represented Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the project Poetry 2012: The Written World, in which a poem was chosen to capture the spirit of each nation competing in the 2012 Olympic Games in a collaboration with BBC Radio Scotland.