Leading environmental author to speak at University College Falmouth

University College Falmouth is to host a lecture by Paul Kingsnorth, one of the UK's most prominent environmental authors, on Monday 8 February.

The event has been organised by MA Professional Writing at Falmouth, with support from the School of Media and in collaboration with the University of Exeter's Department of English. It also forms part of the Comprehending Nature series run by Falmouth's Research into Art, Nature and the Environment research cluster.

Paul Kingsnorth's most recent book is Real England: The Battle against the Bland (2008), which looks at the impact of globalisation on this country - the homogenising of the landscape, the death of the small, the local and the individual, and the people fighting for a different kind of future. Reviewing the book in the Independent, Professor Nick Groom hailed it as "a watershed study, a crucially important book; the most significant account of today's England I have read".

Paul's first book, One No, Many Yeses (2003), was a travelogue exploring the rise of the global resistance movement around the world, from Mexico to Papua New Guinea. It also attracted rave reviews, with the Guardian's George Monbiot describing it as "gripping, engaging and inspiring", while the New Scientist's reviewer commented that the book "reminded me of John Reed's classic reportage from the Russian and Mexican revolutions a century ago".

The talk will take place on Monday 8 February at the Chapel Lecture Theatre, University College Falmouth, Tremough Campus from 6.00pm to 7.30pm. A limited number of seats at Paul's lecture are available to the public and can be reserved by emailing tom.scott@falmouth.ac.uk.

Paul is also one of the driving forces behind the Dark Mountain Project, http://www.dark-mountain.net/, a new literary and artistic movement that aims "to bring together writers and artists, thinkers and doers, to assault the established citadels of literature and thought, and to begin to redraw the maps by which we navigate the places and times in which we find ourselves".

The Dark Mountain Manifesto excited considerable interest when it was published last year. Writing in the New Statesman, John Gray observed: "This slim pamphlet aims to demolish contemporary beliefs about progress, industrialism and the place of human beings on the planet, and up to a point it succeeds. Much in contemporary thought is made up of myths masquerading as facts, and it is refreshing to see these myths clearly identified as such. The authors are right that none is more powerful than the idea that we are separate from the natural world, and free to use it as we see fit."

The first edition of the Dark Mountain Journal will be launched in May at Uncivilisation 2010, a three-day festival organised by the Dark Mountain Project in Llangollen, north Wales.

Paul is also a former deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine and a frequent contributor to many national newspapers and magazines, as well as to the current affairs website Open Democracy. In 2001 he was named as one of Britain's "top ten troublemakers" by the New Statesman magazine.

This talk is a continuation of a series of high profile external speakers being invited to the College. Recent guests on the MA Professional Writing course have included best-selling novelist Patrick Gale, award-winning travel writer Philip Marsden and the BBC‘s Controller of Drama Production and New Talent, John Yorke.

For further information regarding Paul Kingsnorth, please visit http://www.paulkingsnorth.net/

For further information about MA Professional Writing at University College Falmouth, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/professionalwriting, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 214374.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name.  It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing.  The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2012/2013 that will be unique to the South West.

The College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One and Convergence), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

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For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email:  jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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