Naomi Klein, an activist writer stalked by controversy
The Canadian is not afraid to tackle serious subjects and big ideas
Was it fate or some algorithmic force beyond our comprehension that meant Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf both converged on London this week? The confusion of these two polarising figures — the former a radical writer and social and political activist, the latter a contrarian academic turned conspiracy theorist — on social media platforms in recent years was the inspiration for Klein’s 2023 book Doppelganger. So it was somehow fitting that as Klein arrived to see Doppelganger awarded the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction on Thursday night, she found her online twin was also in town.
Fitting, too, that Klein should acknowledge the coincidence with a wry post on X. The same day that Wolf took to the platform to denounce London as “a globalist parking lot” with “no sign of British culture”, Klein remarked: “For the record London, I think you are gorgeous.”
Praised by Suzannah Lipscomb, chair of the judging panel, as “a courageous, humane and optimistic call to arms”, Doppelganger begins with an absurd, almost comical, scenario of mistaken identity but quickly expands its purview to grapple with themes that define our online era: the rise of personal branding, the flourishing of alt-right politics, information wars and conflict in the Middle East. It’s the most personal of Klein’s books, but is also typical of her output in its range and ambition.
In 1999, at the age of 29, Klein became an overnight sensation with the publication of her first book No Logo, an elegant and excoriating critique of consumer capitalism. It helped that its release came in the days following the “Battle of Seattle”, a series of protests that erupted against the World Trade Organization. By 2005, she was ranked 11th in a poll of global intellectuals organised by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. The book was followed in 2007 by The Shock Doctrine, in which Klein trained her sights on free-market economic policy, before shifting her focus to expose neoliberalism’s contribution to climate change in 2014’s This Changes Everything and 2019’s On Fire.
“I write books of Big Ideas About Serious Subjects,” she declares with knowing humour in her introduction to Doppelganger. Depending on your point of view — or, more likely, your politics — these “big ideas” either represent the courageous speaking of truth to power or the shrieks of a meddling ideologue.
Something of Klein’s own radicalism can be traced through her family lineage. The daughter of American Jews — Michael Klein, a physician, and Bonnie Sherr Klein, a feminist filmmaker — she was born in Montreal in 1970, two years after her father moved the family to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. She has also cited her grandfather, an animator for Walt Disney who co-organised the first animators’ strike in 1941, for which he was fired and outed as a communist in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, as a powerful early influence.
“[My grandfather] would draw Donald Duck for me and it was magic to suddenly see this character from movies just appear on a napkin, [but] that coexisted with this terrible story about how he had been mistreated by the company,” Klein said in a 2017 interview. “So yes, he taught me to look behind the gloss, to look behind the surface, but he also taught me that we can hold contradiction, that we can be attracted to it, love it, want it and [also] be troubled by it [and] want fairness.”
A free spirit and self-described “teenybopper” in her youth, Klein came to political consciousness in the aftermath of the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989, when an antifeminist gunman killed 14 women at the Montreal engineering school. “It was the moment when I could no longer be this apolitical teenager because you had to call yourself a feminist,” she has said.
Klein’s status as an activist has grown as social justice, climate change and anti-Zionism have moved to the foreground of cultural and political debate. She is an outspoken supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. Last month, she was among 700-plus signatories, under the umbrella group Fossil Free Books, who called for the asset management firm Baillie Gifford (formerly a prominent sponsor of UK literary festivals) to divest from the fossil fuel industry and companies “with direct or indirect links to Israel’s defence, tech and cyber security industries, including Nvidia, Amazon and Alphabet”.
The first £30,000 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction — launched in response to new research highlighting the relative lack of consumer visibility available for female writers of non-fiction — is sponsored by the online genealogy service Findmypast. Its sister award, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (which was won this year by the American author VV Ganeshananthan), is sponsored by the Baileys liqueur brand and Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon.
Accepting the prize, Klein paid tribute to her fellow shortlisted writers and their “commitment to examining the shadowlands of our world”, and revealed that this week someone had been tearing down promotional book posters featuring her photo around London. “The weird thing is, I don’t know what had angered them,” she said. “I don’t know if it was what I had written about vaccine misinformation, what I had written about Zionism, what I had written about climate change and Fossil Free Books.” Controversy, it seems, just follows Klein around.
