How Might Fiction Prepare Us for Ecological Apocalypse? Paul Kingsnorth
Paul Kingsnorth reflects on enduring questions of community, fear and human nature through a fictional group of survivors of an ecological apocalypse.
A thousand years in the future, a small religious community is living in what were once the fens of eastern England. They are perhaps the world’s last human survivors. Now, they find themselves stalked by a force that draws ever closer, a force intent on destroying everything they stand for.
Set on the far side of the ecological apocalypse, Kingsnorth’s new novel is a mythical, polyphonic drama driven by elemental themes: of community versus the self, the mind versus the body, machine versus human – of whether to put your faith in the present or the future.
Alexandria completes the Buckmaster Trilogy, which began with Kingsnorth’s prize-winning The Wake. We’ll be talking about these novels; Kingsnorth’s recent conversion to Orthodox Christianity; why he left the environmental movement; and capitalism.
In conversation with Bristol Ideas director Andrew Kelly.
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Paul Kingsnorth’s Alexandria is published by Faber & Faber. Buy a copy from Waterstones, our bookselling partners.
Paul Kingsnorth’s debut novel, The Wake, won the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize and the Bookseller Book of the Year Award, as well as being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Folio Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Beast, the second book in his Buckmaster Trilogy, was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award 2017. Alexandria completes the Buckmaster Trilogy. He is also the author of the non-fiction books One No, Many Yeses, Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Savage Gods, as well as two poetry collections, Kidland and Songs from the Blue River. Kingsnorth is the co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project.
Image Credit: Claire McNamee
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