About the Author: Paul Kingsnorth

Paul Kingsnorth was born in 1972. He studied modern history at Oxford University, where he was also heavily involved in the road protest movement of the early 1990s.

After graduating, Paul spent two months in Indonesia working on conservation projects in Borneo and Java. Back in the UK, he worked for a year on the staff of the Independent newspaper. Following a three year stint as a campaign writer for an environmental NGO, he was appointed deputy editor of The Ecologist, where he worked for two years under the editorship of Zac Goldsmith.

He left the Ecologist in 2001 to write his first book One No, Many Yeses, a political travelogue which explored the growing anti-capitalist movement around the world. The book was published in 2003 by Simon and Schuster, in six languages across 13 countries.

In the early 2000s, having spent time with the tribal people of West Papua, who continue to be brutally colonised by the Indonesian government and military, Paul was instrumental in setting up the Free West Papua Campaign, which he also helped to run for a time.

Paul’s second book, Real England, was published in 2008 by Portobello. An exploration of the changing face of his home country in an age of globalisation, the book was quoted in speeches by the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, helped inspire the success of the hit West End play ‘Jerusalem’ and saw its author compared to Cobbett and Orwell by more than one newspaper.

In 2009, Paul launched, with Dougald Hine, the Dark Mountain Project – a call for a literary movement to respond to the ongoing collapse of the world’s ecological and economic certainties. What began as a self-published pamphlet has become a global network of writers, artists and thinkers. Paul is now the Project’s director and one of its editors.

In 2011, Paul’s first collection of poetry, Kidland, was published by Salmon. Since the mid-1990s, Paul’s poetry has been published in magazines including Envoi, Iota, Poetry Life and nthposition. He has been awarded the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Award and the Poetry Life Prize, and was narrowly pipped to the post in the Thomas Hardy Society’s annual competition.

Paul’s journalism has appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Le Monde, New Statesman, Ecologist, New Internationalist, Big Issue, Adbusters, BBC Wildlife and openDemocracy, for which he has also worked as a commissioning editor. He has appeared on various TV and radio programmes, most shamefully ‘This Morning with Richard and Judy.’ He is also the author of ‘Your Countryside, Your Choice’, a report on the future of the countryside, published in 2005 by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.