The anti-brand author spent her teens obsessed with designer labels
Naomi Klein, whose book No Logo became a handbook for critics of corporate globalisation, grew up haunting shopping malls and rejecting her feminist mother's politics. Two shocks in her late teens changed her course, and she went on to sell over a million copies of that first book in more than 28 languages.
Klein was born in Montreal in 1970 to American parents who had moved to Canada in 1967 to resist the Vietnam War. Her mother, Bonnie Sherr Klein, made documentaries; her father was a physician. Her paternal grandparents had been communists, and her grandfather, a Disney animator, lost his job after the 1941 strike. As a teenager she found a very public feminist mother oppressive and embraced consumerism instead. Then, at 17, her mother suffered a disabling stroke and the family became her carers; a year later, the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of women engineering students jolted her toward feminism.
She edited the University of Toronto's student paper and left before finishing her degree to work at The Globe and Mail. No Logo, published in 1999, attacked brand culture and accused big companies of exploiting workers in poor countries; Nike issued a point-by-point rebuttal. With her husband, filmmaker Avi Lewis, she made The Take in 2004 about Argentine workers who reopened a closed factory as a collective.
The Shock Doctrine of 2007 argued that free-market reforms associated with Milton Friedman's Chicago school were pushed through while societies reeled from disasters, coups or invasions, citing cases from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia and post-invasion Iraq. Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón made a short film of it, Michael Winterbottom a documentary, and it won the first Warwick Prize for Writing. The New Yorker called her the most visible figure on the American left.
Her focus then shifted to climate. This Changes Everything, in 2014, contended that market fundamentalism blocks serious climate action and won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize. Later books applied her disaster-capitalism lens to Trump-era politics and to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. She received the Sydney Peace Prize in 2016, and in 2021 became UBC's professor of climate justice and co-director of its Centre for Climate Justice.
Source: Naomi Klein
