Paul Kingsnorth

Dark Mountain

‘Much in contemporary thought is made up of myths masquerading as facts, and it is refreshing to see these myths identified as such.’ - John Gray, New Statesman

I co-founded the Dark Mountain Project in 2009 with the intention of encouraging, promoting and creating a type of writing that I wasn’t seeing much of in our literary and journalistic cultures. That is, writing which acted as if we were living in the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. Writing that was open-eyed about humanity’s destruction of the Earth and the depleted future we are creating, but which did not respond to these things with polemic or hysteria but with a cool-headed attempt to engage with the myths we have created around our civilisation.

Dark Mountain is about unpicking the stories behind our failing civilisation, and creating new ones to replace them.

The Dark Mountain anthologies exist to collect and showcase these stories. They are hardback collections of essays, poems, stories and art which aim to undermine our self-regarding narratives about human centrality and progress, and look to the inklings of a new set of perceptions.