Oct 11, 2021
I am excited to be speaking to Paul Kingsnorth in this episode. Paul and I talk about the challenges that society faces and how we got here this journey encompasses education, capitalism and we discuss how the old stories warn us of such times. Paul is deeply insightful as always and it is good to speak to someone who wears his heart on his sleeve.
https://www.paulkingsnorth.net
Paul Kingsnorth 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 tends to be mythological and multi-layered.
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
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. This was Kingsnorth's first successful book, resulting in reviews by all major newspapers and citation in speeches by both David Cameron and the archbishop of Canterbury.
He has contributed to The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Le Monde, New Statesman, London Review of Books, Granta, The Ecologist, New Internationalist, The Big Issue, Adbusters, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 2, BBC Four, ITV, and Resonance FM.
His first novel, 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 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, completing a loose thematic trilogy beginning with The Wake, will also be published by Faber. 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".
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