Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein (born in Montreal in 1970) is a Canadian journalist, writer and activist best known for her critique of globalization and capitalism. She writes in English, and her work belongs to the political debate of the early twenty-first century, when anti-globalization movements gained public visibility. Her books matter because they turned complicated economic questions into arguments that general readers can follow.

Klein grew up in a Jewish family with a tradition of pacifism. Her parents, who had hippie sympathies, moved from the United States to Montreal in 1967 in protest against the Vietnam War. As a teenager she was uninterested in politics and drawn to consumer culture, until two events changed her outlook: her mother's stroke, which forced her to put her studies on hold for a year, and the Montreal Massacre at the École Polytechnique, which pushed her toward feminism. Her first pieces appeared in The Varsity, the University of Toronto student paper, and she later worked at The Globe and Mail and at This Magazine.

Her breakthrough came with No Logo, an examination of the branding strategies of large corporations and of the working conditions behind the products they sold, often made in poorer countries. The book became an international bestseller and a touchstone for the anti-globalization movement. Her style mixes reporting, data and firsthand testimony, and her later work keeps the same critical eye. In The Shock Doctrine she argued that certain free-market policies have been pushed through in the aftermath of crises, wars and disasters, when ordinary people have the least capacity to resist. In This Changes Everything she linked capitalism to the climate crisis and contended that the dominant economic model makes deep reform very hard. No Is Not Enough revisited these ideas with contemporary examples.

Klein has also worked in film. She wrote The Take, a documentary directed by her husband, Avi Lewis, and she has been a public campaigner for climate justice. Her honours include the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Sydney Peace Prize. Her legacy lies in making the critique of brand culture and of disaster-driven economic policy widely known, and in shaping debate on the North American left, where she has been compared to figures such as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Like any sweeping critique of the system, her work is contested, but it remains a reference point for readers trying to understand the links between markets, inequality and the environment.