Wild Saints
& Green Men

Paul is an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist. He is the author of eleven books, including the Booker Prize-longlisted novel The Wake (2014) and the recent New York Times bestseller Against The Machine (2025). His books have been translated into over a dozen languages.

Paul began writing professionally in the mid-1990s. He worked for a while as a trainee journalist in Fleet Street, before leaving to become the in-house writer for an environmental campaign group in London. Later he was deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine for two years, before leaving to write his first book, One No, Many Yeses (2003). His second book, Real England (2008), a tour around a country losing its character to the forces of corporate globalisation, was quoted in speeches by the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Independent called it 'a watershed study.'

In 2009, Paul co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of writers and artists creating new stories for an age of upheaval and collapse.

In 2014 he published his first novel, The Wake. Set in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of England, and written entirely in its own version of Old English, the novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and won the Gordon Burn Prize. Paul's second novel, Beast, was published in 2016. Together with his 2021 follow-up Alexandria, it completed a thematic whole: the Buckmaster Trilogy. 

His 2025 non-fiction book Against The Machine became a New York Times bestseller on publication, and is currently in translation in nine different languages. The TLS called it 'Allen Ginsberg updated for the internet age.'

Paul has also published three collections of poetry. In 2026, he founded his own artisan publishing house, Hermit Crab Press with his wife Navjyoat.

You can read more about Paul, his books and his past work on his personal website.