Paul Kingsnorth

Paul Kingsnorth (born 20 October 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.

Early life and education 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.

Kingsnorth was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and St Anne's College, Oxford, where he studied modern history. During this period he became involved in the Dongas road protest group at sites including Twyford Down, Solsbury Hill, and the M11 link road protest in east London. After chaining himself to a bridge alongside fifty others, Kingsnorth was arrested, an event that solidified the importance of protest for him. At Oxford, Kingsnorth edited the University's longest-running student newspaper, Cherwell.

Career With his student newspaper 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 In 2020, he was called "England's greatest living writer" by Aris Roussinos.

In 2004, he was one of the founders of the Free West Papua Campaign, which campaigns for the secession of the provinces of Papua and West Papua from Indonesia, where Kingsnorth was made an honorary member of the Lani tribe in 2001.

The Dark Mountain Project

Kingsnorth announced retirement from journalism in late 2007 in a blog post. His second collection, Songs From The Blue River, was published by Salmon in 2018.

His first novel, The Wake, published via crowdfunding by Unbound in April 2014, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and won the Gordon Burn Prize. Film rights to the novel were sold to a consortium led by the actor Mark Rylance and the former president of HBO Films Colin Callender.

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.

In 2022, Kingsnorth self-published The Vaccine Moment, a collection of his essays criticising public health mitigation of COVID-19.

Public lectures In 2024, Kingsnorth delivered the thirty-seventh Erasmus Lecture titled Against Christian Civilization. Hosted by First Things magazine and the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the lecture explored the relationship between Christianity and modernity, questioning whether the West’s civilizational project has distorted the faith it claims to uphold. Kingsnorth reflected on themes of conversion, culture, and the spiritual costs of technological progress, arguing for a return to a more rooted, sacramental understanding of Christian life and the created order.

Conversion to Orthodox Christianity In January 2020, Kingsnorth converted to Christianity and was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church. He had previously explored Zen Buddhism and Wicca, which he later described as inadequate responses to the cultural and ecological crises he perceived. Kingsnorth has said that his decision to become a Christian was not primarily the result of rational argument, but of personal experiences, including vivid dreams and what he characterized as being "dragged out" of his former beliefs. He wrote about his spiritual journey and conversion to Christianity in a June 2021 essay in First Things.

Selected writings Books Nonfiction One No, Many Yeses (2003) Real England (2008) Uncivilization (2009) Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (2017) Savage Gods (2020) Against The Machine (2025)

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

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

As editor Dark Mountain: issue 1, (2010, Dark Mountain Project) Dark Mountain: issue 2, (2011, Dark Mountain Project) Dark Mountain: issue 3, (2012, Dark Mountain Project) Dark Mountain: issue 4, (2013, Dark Mountain Project) Dark Mountain: issue 5, (2014, Dark Mountain Project) Dark Mountain: issue 6, (2014, Dark Mountain Project) The World-Ending Fire: the essential Wendell Berry, (2017, Penguin Press)