*(Occasionally Asked Questions)
Who are you?
I am 75% English, 25% Greek Cypriot, 100% European and 0% European Union. I am descended from the Viking Earls of the Orkney Isles. My surname is Kentish and my family are Londoners. I grew up in England, where my family have lived for a thousand years, and I now live in the west of Ireland, with my English-Punjabi wife and our children, some hens, a dog, a compost toilet, an orchard, some polytunnels and a lot of trees.
But you’re probably here because of my writing. Over the last quarter of a century I’ve written nine books, and far too many essays and articles.
What have you written?
My first book, One No, Many Yeses (2003), was a tour around the world’s centres of resistance to globalisation, which took in anti-privatisation protests in Soweto, Zapatista encampments in Chiapas, counter-G8 demos on the streets of Genoa and landless workers’ rebellions in rural Brazil.
Back home, it wasn’t hard to see that the same forces which were razing and homogenising the mosaic of human cultures around the world were doing the same thing in my homeland. My second book, Real England (2008), was an acount of this pillaging of local cultures, and of the people standing against it.
In 2011 my first collection of poems, Kidland, was published.
In 2014, I published my first novel, The Wake. A labour of love, written in its own langauge and set during the Norman Conquest of 1066 - England’s original fracture - it somehow ended up on the longlist for the Booker Prize, which got me a lot of attention for about five minutes.
In 2016 my second novel, Beast was published. By now, I was writing a trilogy, set over 2000 years of time, of which The Wake was the first installment and this was the second.
The next year, 2017, I published a collection of the essays I had been writing over the last decade in the Dark Mountain books, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.
2018 saw the publication of my second poetry collection, Songs from the Blue River.
In 2019, I published a book about the problem of books. Savage Gods is about the meaning of words, the meaning of belonging and the experience of personal crisis.
In 2020 my third novel, Alexandria, was published. It’s the final book of the ‘Buckmaster Trilogy’, which began in 2014 with The Wake.
In 2021 I began a new writing project, The Abbey of Misrule, a series of ongoing essays about the unfurling madness of the times.
What else have you done?
In the late 1990s, I was deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine.
In 2004, I was one of the founders of the Free West Papua Campaign, which works to free the tribal people of West Papua, with whom I lived for a while, from military and corporate occupation. I was made an honorary member of the Lani tribe for my work there.
In 2009, I launched the Dark Mountain Project with Dougald Hine. Our manifesto pointed at the cliff edge humanity is plummetting over, and asked: why are we not writing as if this were real? I ran Dark Mountain until 2017.
In 2018, I founded my own little teaching academy, The Wyrd School, the aim of which was to inject writing and art with some of the wild, animist energy that I thought we should see more of in the world.
What do you believe?
I am an animist in an age of machines; a poet-of-sorts in a dictatorship of merchants; a believer in a culture of cynics. Either I'm mad, or the world is. It could be both, I suppose. But I don’t believe in most of the stories my society tells me. I’m not even sure my society believes them anymore.
Here are some things I believe instead.
I believe that the global industrial economy – what William Cobbet called ‘the Thing’, but what we might equally simply call the human empire – is destroying the life support systems of the Earth itself, razing and homogenising the mosaic of human cultures and increasingly using humans as fodder in a techno-industrial machine which may one day supplant us. This is known as ‘progress’. Its cultural arm, individualist liberalism, is meanwhile engaged in stripping all meaning, truth and traditional support structures from our lives, in a headlong plunge towards what looks to be a glorified nihilism disguised as ‘freedom’.
In opposition to this, I believe in a healthy suspicion of entrenched power, whether it is entrenched in leaders, states or corporations; decentralisation of economics, politics and culture; connection to land, nature and heritage; a deep attention to matters of the spirit; heterodox tolerance, freedom of expression and an appreciation of beauty. A man can dream.
My most strongly-held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war. My interest these days is what this means.
What are your politics?
In my non-fiction writing in particular, I’ve long made a deliberate effort to speak across tribal divides to the bigger concerns as I see them. One result is that I have all kinds of thinking readers from all over the spectrum. Another is that people can’t work out what names to call me. Over the years, I’ve had a beautifully diverse range of labels stuck on me, including (but not limited to) communist, anarchist, reactionary, crazy collapsitarian, woolly liberal, soy boy, nativist, cave-dweller, Luddite, Romantic, left-wing oikophile, eco-socialist, eco-fascist, doomer, nihilist, ‘lower middle-class eco-toff’ and - my current favourite - ‘environmental activist turned apocalyptic mystic.’
If I had to pin a label on my chest these days, I’d probably call myself a reactionary radical.
What about religion?
I have never been a scientific materialist. My suspicion that there is more to the world than modernity will allow for has informed my sensibility since I was a child, and was the backdrop to all my environmental activism and writing.
Over the last decade, I have been on an increasing determined search for Truth which - as for so many lost Western people - has taken me to all quarters. For five years I studied and practiced Zen Buddhism; I’m still grateful for the insights that accorded me, but there was something missing. In search of what that something might be, I explored Daoism, mythology, Sufism, traditionalism, Alexandrian Wicca and all sorts of other bits and pieces. They all taught me something, but not enough.
Then, in 2020, as the world was turned upside down, so was I. Unexpectedly, and initially against my will, I found myself being pulled determinedly towards Christianity. Suffice it to say that I started the year as an eclectic eco-pagan with a long-held, unformed ache in my heart, and ended it a practicing Christian, the ache gone and replaced by the thing that, all along, I turned out to have been looking for. In January 2021 I was baptised and received into the Eastern Orthodox Church. You can read about that journey here. I don’t know where the path leads from here, but at last I know how to walk it.
What are you writing now?
On the completion of Savage Gods, an account of my collapse of confidence in the ability of these glyphs to say what they mean, I made a vow: to write nothing new for a year and a day. I stuck to it. I hoped I could retire and become a gardener or something, but it turned out that the times wouldn’t let me.
So in 2021 I started writing a fortnightly series of online essays, trying to plough my way through the chaos of the times in search for some explanations. It’s called The Abbey of Misrule. As of late 2023, I have plans to turn this series into a book.
How do I contact you?
I don’t have any social media presence, but you can send me an email.
Please note that I don’t blurb books, and I can’t respond to people who are seeking editorial help with their own writing. If you’d still like to write to me, you can click here.
If you’d like to talk about businessy things, such as rights, translations, or turning any of my books into multi-million pound Hollywood blockbusters, my agent would love to hear from you
If you’d like to keep up with what I’m writing at the moment, my Substack is the place to go.