Kidland
“Kingsnorth arrives with snow on his shoulders and embers in his gut”
Mario Petrucci
Dark Mountain
“It may be the most honest attempt at literature we’ve seen.”
Sharon Astyk
Real England
“I would like Gordon Brown to be strapped into a chair and have this read to him.” Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
One No, Many Yeses
“Part visionary, part historian: accessible, impassioned and persuasive.”
Esquire
Welcome to my website. I’m currently in the process of building up a personal selection of the best of my journalism and essays from the last fifteen years or so. You’ll also find information about my books, and my poetry, some of which was recently published in my first collection. You can also try and get your head around the Dark Mountain Project, the literary-cultural initiative I co-founded in 2009, and there’s an open invitation to attend any of my forthcoming events. I hope you enjoy what’s on offer.
Kidland, and other poems
Published in April 2011 by Salmon Poetry
Kidland is my new – indeed, my first – collection of poetry, and it’s the culmination of nearly twenty years of writing. Poetry to me seems truer than other forms of writing, perhaps because of its intensity and the freedom it grants from expectation. The poems in this book rise from ancient landscapes – from the moors of northern England to the sands of the Nevada desert – to confront a society in denial about its relationship with nature, memory and destiny. There’s more on the book here, and on my poetry here.
Latest articles
Burns and Barnes: a tale of two Poets
Published in the Guardian, 25 January 2012
The differing fates of two dialect poets may tell us something about the differing priorities of England and Scotland.
This collapse is a 'crisis of Bigness'
Published in the Guardian, 26 September 2011
The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it
Upon the Mathematics of the Falling Away
Published in Dark Mountain issue 2, June 2011
Suicide is everywhere in this culture, under every stone, and once you come to be a part of that great, unspeaking clan of people who have been touched by it, you see this.
Set in Prociono and Linden Hill Italic, both by Barry Schwartz.
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