Paul Kingsnorth
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Paul Kingsnorth (born 1972 in Worcester) is an English writer and environmentalist. He currently resides in Oxford, England.
Kingsnorth studied modern history at Oxford University between 1991 and 1994. During this period he was introduced to environmental politics through involvement in the road protest movement at sites including Twyford Down, Solsbury Hill and the M11 link road protest in East London. He was arrested during 'Operation Greenfly', part of the Twyford Down road protest, in 1993. Much of his writing has since been focused on environmental and related issues.
Kingsnorth has worked in an orangutan rehabilitation centre in Borneo, as a peace observer in the rebel Zapatista villages of Mexico, as a floor-sweeper in McDonalds and as an assistant lock-keeper on the river Thames. In 2004, he was a co-founder of the Free West Papua Campaign, which campaigns for the tribal people of occupied West Papua, Indonesia, where Kingsnorth was made an honorary member of the Lani tribe in 2001.
In 1995, after leaving university, Kingsnorth worked on the comment desk of the Independent, before leaving to join the environmental campaign group EarthAction. He has subsequently worked as commissioning editor for openDemocracy and as deputy editor of The Ecologist, the world's longest-running environmental magazine, for which he currently writes a monthly column. He was named one of Britain's 'top ten troublemakers' by the New Statesman magazine in 2001.
Kingsnorth is also a published poet. His work has appeared in UK poetry magazines including Envoi, Iota, Reach, The Lighthouse, Staple, Agenda and nthposition. He won the Poetry Life National Competition in 1998, and was named BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year in the same year.
In recent years, Kingsnorth has written for or contributed to the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Le Monde, New Statesman, Ecologist, New Internationalist, Big Issue, Adbusters, BBC Wildlife, openDemocracy, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 2, BBC Four, ITV and Resonance FM. He is 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.
His first book, One No, Many Yeses (Simon and Schuster, 2003), an investigative journey through the 'anti-globalisation' movement, was published in six languages in thirteen countries. His second book, Real England, is published by Portobello Books in 2008.
