Could you puff yourself up in a few paragraphs of third person prose please?
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.
That was longer than I expected. What’s the gist?
Paul is a writer. He has …
You can use the first person now, if you like.
Thanks. I am a writer. I have been a number of other things in my time, and still am, but that’s the job description I put on the insurance forms.
Looking back on my work over the last fifteen years or so, I think that my writing is primarily about two things: connection and loss. The connections are those between people and places, people and power, people and nature. Here in the West, we have built (or, more likely, accidentally slid into over time) a strange culture of disconnection: increasingly cut off from nature, from our history and provenance, from each other, from the wild reality outside the bubble of our civilisation. We have built a culture of consumer isolation, and I am haunted by the losses which this has brought about. I want to know what has been lost, what is left, what it means.
Here is some more detail about my books; my poetry; my journalism and the Dark Mountain Project.
Are you important enough to be on Wikipedia?
It looks like it. I promise I didn’t write this, though I can’t promise I have never edited it to make myself look less boring.
Do you do anything other than write?
I have a family, which I tend to as lovingly as I can. I run the Dark Mountain Project, which takes up a lot of my time. I go fell-running whenever I need to reconnect with wind, rain and rock, which is quite often given the computery nature of writing these days.
Every summer, I also teach people how to mow grass with a scythe. No, really. This is part of a wider personal project of learning and passing on useful land-based skills. I do this for many reasons: because I find that they provide a depth and engagement with the real world that talking into screens does not; because they connect me to my past and that of my homeland; because I love being outdoors and getting my hands dirty; because I think that the near future is going to be a lot more hands-on than the recent past; and because I plan to get some land to bring up my family on just as soon as I can afford it. To this end, I am also learning green woodworking and permaculture, and teaching myself about horticulture, coppicing and smallholding. Badly and slowly in most cases, but it’s a start.
You can find out more about scything here, where you can also book a place on one of my courses. It’s a grand day out.
What are your politics?
Oh dear. I can feel my mind narrowing just thinking about this one. But I understand why people ask it, especially given my past writing. So let me try and answer.
I am left wing. That is to say that I am opposed to obscene concentrations of land, power and wealth, I instinctively favour the underdog and, like anyone else who is paying attention, I am anti-capitalist. Capitalism is the name applied to an economic and cultural machine which makes paper profits for agglomerations of private individuals by externalising its costs onto nature and the weaker bits of humanity. It functions by turning living things into dead things and calling this process ‘growth’. Capitalism is like a tank: it’s a death machine which feels safe and warm as long as you’re sitting inside it rather than in its way.
I am also right wing. That is to say that I am suspicious of ‘progress’ when that word is used to denote the onward march of the industrial machine (see above), and I think that a feeling for place and locality, the meaning of land and our space in history and human community are things worth paying close attention to. I am instinctively suspicious of the state, I don’t have a problem with private ownership of things (in principle and with limits) and I am suspicious of the increasingly rudderless liberal project, which seems to me, rather ironically, to be growing more illiberal as its ideology runs up against the buffers of contraction and decline.
Perhaps this just suggests that I’m confused, but I prefer to see it as a hint that things are changing fast, and we ought to keep up. Isms and self-definitions tend to bind the hands and limit the imagination. I’ve stopped worrying about them, and it feels good.
Can I use, reprint or share your work?
All of my writing is copyrighted, but I publish it on the web under a Creative Commons licence. You can copy, share and distribute it for free and without permission, as long as you attribute it to me and you don’t cash in on it without asking. The full terms of the licence are here . If you’d like to use my work in ways which aren’t covered by it, please drop me a line.
Could you come and speak at my event/festival/conference/campaign meeting?
I do a fair bit of public speaking, at events ranging from big literary festivals to local book groups, and it’s always very nice to be asked. My forthcoming events calendar is here. I appreciate any interest in my work, so do get in touch if you’d like to discuss a potential event. I will ask for payment and travel expenses – this is how I make a living, after all. But I’m always open to discussion.
Do you have any advice for aspiring/young/beginning writers?
Some of my thoughts about the writer’s life can be found here.
Can I connect with you through social media?
There is a Paul Kingsnorth Facebook page which I administer and which you can ‘like’ if you want to be kept up to date with what I’m up to. I also now have a Twitter account, if you like that sort of thing. It sometimes gets a bit ranty.
I’d like to make a major motion picture about your exciting life. Where do I send the contract?
All my contact details are here
Do you have a mailing list to which I can sign up, swiftly and easily, to receive occasional pithy email updates about your work?
I’m glad you asked! You can do that here.
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