Paul Kingsnorth (born 1972) is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project.
Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation-level trends. His fiction, notably the Buccmaster Trilogy, tends to be mythological and multi-layered.
Biography
Kingsnorth spent his childhood in southern England with two younger brothers (one went on to work with Friends of the Earth, the other for Citibank). His father was a passionate Thatcherite, a businessman, and a mechanical engineer. Kingsnorth describes his father's background as "working-class," and he says that his father pushed Kingsnorth to go to university. He was the first in his family to do so.[1]
At Oxford, Kingsnorth edited the University's longest-running student newspaper, Cherwell. With this background, he started working on the comment desk of The Independent in 1994. But he found this work frivolous and uninspiring, so after less than a year Kingsnorth left[2] to join the environmental campaign group EarthAction. He has subsequently worked as commissioning editor for openDemocracy, as a publications editor for Greenpeace and, between 1999 and 2001, as deputy editor of The Ecologist. He was named one of Britain's "top ten troublemakers" by the New Statesman magazine in 2001.[4] In 2020, he was called "England's greatest living writer" by Aris Roussinos.[5]
Hine and Kingsnorth providing a five-year retrospective on the Dark Mountain Project
Kingsnorth announced retirement from journalism in late 2007 in a blog post.[2] In 2009, with writer and social activist Dougald Hine, Kingsnorth founded the Dark Mountain Project, "a network of writers, artists, and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself". Since 2009 it has run a series of summer festivals and smaller events, produced bi-annual anthologies of "uncivilised" writing and art, and built up an international collection of writers and artists who aim to "offer up a challenge to the foundations of our civilisation". One Uncivilization festival described by the New York Times in 2014 included sessions on contemporary nature writing, a panel describing criticisms of psychiatric care, a reading by Kingsnorth from his book The Wake, and a midnight ritual. The ritual involved the burning of a wicker effigy of a tree.[10][1] He was one of the Project's directors until stepping down in 2017.[citation needed]
Writing
After travelling through Mexico, West Papua, Genoa in Italy, and Brazil, Kingsnorth wrote his first book in 2003, One No, Many Yeses. The book explored how globalisation played a role in destroying historic cultures around the world.[1] The book was not successful on initial printing, in part because it came in the first week of the Iraq war.[2] It was published in 6 languages in 13 countries.[citation needed]
Kingsnorth's second book, Real England, was published by Portobello Books in 2008. In this book, he reflected on how those same forces of globalisation affected England, his own country, in the homogenization of culture.[1] This was Kingsnorth's first successful book, resulting in reviews by all major newspapers and citations in speeches by both David Cameron and the archbishop of Canterbury. Writing the book involved travelling for months to interview Englishmen working in traditional institutions, including pubs, shops, and farms. The research process left Kingsnorth ambivalent after facing the forces of development, privatization, and conglomeration.[2]
His first collection of poetry, Kidland and Other Poems, was published by Salmon in 2011.[3] In 2012, he won the Wenlock Prize for "Vodadahue Mountain".[11] His second collection, Songs From The Blue River, was published by Salmon in 2018.
Kingsnorth's second novel, Beast, was published in 2016 by Faber and Faber and was shortlisted for the Encore Award for the Best Second Novel in 2017. His third novel, Alexandria, was published by Faber in 2021, completing a loose thematic trilogy, beginning with The Wake, which was eventually christened the Buccmaster Trilogy.[15] Announcing the deal, Faber's editorial director, Lee Brackstone, said: "We are welcoming to Faber a writer who belongs in the tradition of past greats like William Golding, Robert Graves, David Peace and Ted Hughes. His sensibility sits comfortably with theirs and his literary achievement could well go on to be their equal. He is that good".[16]
