Paul Kingsnorth

Based on Wikipedia: Paul Kingsnorth

The Troublemaker Who Gave Up Hope

In 2001, the New Statesman magazine named Paul Kingsnorth one of Britain's "top ten troublemakers." Nearly two decades later, the writer Aris Roussinos called him "England's greatest living writer." Between these two descriptions lies a journey that took Kingsnorth from chaining himself to bridges in protest, through a crisis of environmental faith, to baptism in a Romanian Orthodox church in rural Ireland.

It's a strange trajectory. But then, Kingsnorth has made a career out of being strange in ways that turn out to be prescient.

A Thatcherite's Son Becomes an Eco-Warrior

Paul Kingsnorth was born on October 20, 1972, in southern England. His father was a passionate supporter of Margaret Thatcher, a businessman, and a mechanical engineer from what Kingsnorth describes as a working-class background. He had two younger brothers—one would eventually work for Friends of the Earth, the environmental advocacy group, while the other joined Citibank, the global financial institution. The family, it seems, produced both halves of the modern argument about capitalism and nature.

Kingsnorth's father pushed him toward university. He became the first in his family to attend, enrolling at St Anne's College, Oxford, to study modern history. But something happened during his time there that set him on a very different path than the upward mobility his father might have envisioned.

He became a road protester.

The early 1990s in Britain saw intense conflicts over new highway construction. Environmental activists occupied trees and tunnels to block roads planned through ancient woodlands and protected landscapes. One of these groups was the Dongas, named after ancient trackways, and Kingsnorth threw himself into their campaigns at Twyford Down, Solsbury Hill, and the M11 link road protest in east London.

The experience that solidified his commitment to protest was being arrested alongside fifty others after chaining himself to a bridge. For a young Oxford student who might have slipped quietly into establishment journalism—he edited Cherwell, the university's longest-running student newspaper—this was a decisive turn toward the margins.

The Making of a Professional Troublemaker

After Oxford, Kingsnorth did briefly try conventional journalism. In 1994, with his student newspaper experience, he started working on the comment desk of The Independent. But he found the work, as he later put it, frivolous and uninspiring. He lasted less than a year before leaving to join EarthAction, an environmental campaign group.

What followed was a decade of environmental activism and advocacy journalism. He worked as commissioning editor for openDemocracy, an online publication focused on global affairs and democracy. He edited publications for Greenpeace. From 1999 to 2001, he served as deputy editor of The Ecologist, one of the world's oldest environmental magazines, founded in 1970.

He also traveled extensively. In 2001, he was made an honorary member of the Lani tribe in West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled western half of the island of New Guinea. Three years later, he co-founded the Free West Papua Campaign, which advocates for the region's independence from Indonesia—a cause that remains largely unknown in the West despite involving one of the world's most controversial territorial disputes.

His first book emerged from these travels. One No, Many Yeses, published in 2003, explored how globalisation was destroying historic cultures around the world. It drew on his experiences in Mexico, West Papua, Genoa, and Brazil. The timing was terrible—it arrived the same week as the Iraq War began—and the book sank without much notice, though it eventually appeared in six languages across thirteen countries.

Coming Home to Find It Gone

His second book succeeded where the first had failed, and it did so by turning inward. Real England, published in 2008, applied the same critical lens he'd used on global cultures to his own country. Kingsnorth spent months traveling across England, interviewing people who worked in traditional institutions—publicans running independent pubs, shopkeepers fighting chain stores, farmers watching their land disappear under development.

The book was not a celebration of England. It was an elegy.

Kingsnorth documented how the forces of development, privatization, and corporate consolidation were homogenizing English culture, replacing local particularity with generic sameness. The independent pub where everyone knew your name became a branded chain outlet. The local shop became a Tesco Express. The family farm became an agribusiness operation or a housing estate.

The book struck a nerve. Every major newspaper reviewed it. David Cameron, then leader of the opposition and soon to be Prime Minister, cited it in speeches. So did the Archbishop of Canterbury. Kingsnorth had articulated something that crossed political boundaries—a sense that something precious was being lost, even if people disagreed about what to do about it.

But the research process left Kingsnorth ambivalent. He had seen the forces of destruction up close, and he wasn't sure they could be stopped.

The Dark Mountain

In late 2007, Kingsnorth announced his retirement from journalism in a blog post. He was done.

Two years later, he emerged with something very different. In 2009, together with writer and social activist Dougald Hine, he founded the Dark Mountain Project. Their manifesto, titled Uncivilisation, began from a startling premise: the stories our civilization tells itself about progress and the future are lies. Environmental destruction cannot be stopped by better policy or greener technology. The project our species has embarked upon—industrial civilization itself—is headed for collapse, and honest artists and writers need to stop pretending otherwise.

This was not optimistic environmentalism. It was not Al Gore urging us to change our lightbulbs. It was not even the apocalyptic urgency of climate activism. It was something stranger and more unsettling: a call to face the end of the world as we know it, accept it, and figure out how to live—and make art—in light of that acceptance.

The project describes itself as "a network of writers, artists, and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself." Since 2009, it has run summer festivals, produced anthologies of what it calls "uncivilised" writing and art, and built an international community of creators grappling with civilizational crisis.

A New York Times reporter attending one of their "Uncivilization" festivals in 2014 described sessions on contemporary nature writing, criticisms of psychiatric care, a reading by Kingsnorth from his novel The Wake, and a midnight ritual involving the burning of a wicker effigy of a tree. It was part literary conference, part environmental wake, part something that might alarm your suburban neighbors.

Kingsnorth directed the project until stepping down in 2017. By then, he had already begun moving in yet another unexpected direction.

Writing in a Dead Language

In 2014, Kingsnorth published his first novel. The Wake is set in 1066, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, and follows a Lincolnshire landowner named Buccmaster who refuses to accept the new order. He takes to the fens—the marshy wetlands of eastern England—to wage a guerrilla resistance against the invaders.

What makes the book remarkable is its language. Kingsnorth wrote it in what he calls a "shadow tongue"—a reconstructed version of Old English, the language spoken before the Normans brought their French words and Latin learning. The text looks like this might look if you squint: recognizably English, but strange, requiring effort to decode.

The effect is disorienting and immersive. You can't read it quickly. You have to slow down, sound out words, puzzle through meanings. And in that slowing down, you start to feel what it might have been like to live in a world that was about to disappear, to speak a language that would soon be overlaid by something foreign.

The book was crowdfunded through a platform called Unbound, which suggests publishers weren't initially convinced that a novel written in fake Old English would find an audience. They were wrong. The Wake was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and won the Gordon Burn Prize. Film rights were sold to a group led by the actor Mark Rylance and Colin Callender, former president of HBO Films.

Kingsnorth followed The Wake with two more novels: Beast in 2016 and Alexandria in 2020. Together, they form what he eventually called the Buccmaster Trilogy, though the connections between them are thematic rather than narrative. Beast follows a man living alone on a moor who may or may not be losing his mind. Alexandria imagines a far-future England after technological civilization has collapsed.

All three books circle around the same questions: What happens when the world you knew ends? How do you live in the ruins? What survives?

The Convert

In January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, Paul Kingsnorth was baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church.

For readers who had followed his career, this might have seemed like the strangest twist yet. Kingsnorth had explored Zen Buddhism. He had practiced Wicca, the modern pagan religion that draws on pre-Christian European traditions. He had written extensively about the loss of connection to nature and place. Orthodox Christianity, with its incense and icons and ancient liturgies, seemed an odd destination for an ecological troublemaker.

But Kingsnorth has said his conversion was not primarily the result of rational argument. It came from experiences—vivid dreams, a sense of being "dragged out" of his former beliefs, an encounter with something he couldn't explain away.

He wrote about his spiritual journey in a June 2021 essay for First Things, a journal of religion and public life. In 2024, he delivered their prestigious Erasmus Lecture, titled "Against Christian Civilization." The lecture argued that the West's civilizational project has distorted the faith it claims to uphold. He called for a return to a more rooted, sacramental understanding of Christian life—Christianity as a way of being in the world rather than a justification for conquering it.

There's a through line here, even if it doesn't look obvious. Kingsnorth has always been against the machine—against the forces of homogenization, abstraction, and control that modern civilization deploys. He was against them when they were destroying English pubs. He was against them when they were paving over ancient woodlands. He's against them now when they promise technological salvation. His turn to Orthodox Christianity is not a retreat from his earlier concerns but an intensification of them: if the machine is the problem, then perhaps the answer lies in something older, stranger, and more demanding than secular environmentalism ever offered.

The Controversies

Not everyone has followed Kingsnorth on his journey. His 2022 self-published book The Vaccine Moment, collecting essays critical of public health responses to COVID-19, put him at odds with many former admirers. His ecological pessimism, which once seemed bracingly honest, can also read as defeatism—a counsel of despair dressed up in literary language.

And his embrace of Orthodox Christianity has puzzled some who knew him as a pagan and an environmentalist. Is it coherent to spend decades lamenting the destruction of pre-Christian European culture and then convert to the religion that destroyed it?

Kingsnorth would probably say that coherence isn't the point. He has never been afraid to contradict himself, to follow his experiences wherever they lead, even when the destination makes his earlier self look foolish. In a 2014 New York Times profile, he quoted the Buddha: "There is no path. The path is made by walking."

The Writer in the West of Ireland

Today, Kingsnorth lives in the west of Ireland with his family, far from the London literary world, running a small farm and writing. He publishes a Substack newsletter called The Abbey of Misrule, named with the ironic self-awareness of someone who knows he's become a kind of strange institution himself—a professional voice crying in the wilderness.

His body of work now includes:

Nonfiction:

• One No, Many Yeses (2003) - on globalisation and resistance
• Real England (2008) - on the homogenization of English culture
• Uncivilisation (2009) - the Dark Mountain manifesto, co-written with Dougald Hine
• Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (2017) - essays on ecological despair
• Savage Gods (2020) - memoir
• Against The Machine (2025)

Fiction:

• The Wake (2014)
• Beast (2017)
• Alexandria (2020)

Poetry:

• Kidland and Other Poems (2011)
• Songs from the Blue River (2018)

He has also edited Dark Mountain anthologies and The World-Ending Fire, a collection of essential writings by the American farmer-poet Wendell Berry, published by Penguin Press in 2017.

What Does It Mean to Give Up Hope?

Kingsnorth's work poses a question that most environmentalists—most modern people—find almost impossible to sit with: What if there's nothing we can do?

Not "nothing we can do to solve the problem perfectly," but nothing we can do to prevent civilizational decline, ecological collapse, the loss of countless species and ways of life. What if the trajectory is set, and our choice is not whether to accept it but how?

This is not a popular message. It sounds like giving up. But Kingsnorth would argue that it's actually a form of honesty that makes meaningful action possible. If you accept that you can't save the world, you can stop wasting energy on false solutions and start doing whatever you can do, in your place, with your hands, for the things you love.

Plant a garden. Learn a craft. Attend to your neighbors. Pray, if that's what you're called to. Let go of the fantasy that you can control the future, and pay attention to what's in front of you.

It's a strange kind of activism—or perhaps the opposite of activism, a stillness in the face of forces too large to fight. But it's consistent with everything Kingsnorth has written, from his early protests against road building to his late-life embrace of Orthodox Christianity. The machine is vast and powerful. It will do what it will do. Your task is not to defeat it but to remain human while it runs.

Whether this is wisdom or rationalized despair, courage or cowardice, is a question Kingsnorth's readers have been arguing about for years. He would probably say that's the wrong question anyway. The right question is: What are you going to do with the time you have?