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14 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 4 NOVEMBER 2018 CULTURE BOOK FESTIVAL CERTAINLY enough, the highlight of 2018's Malta Book Festival will be an encounter with the acclaimed author and journalist Naomi Klein, whose No Logo in 2000 became a manual for the Occupy Wall Street generation of activists in the years to come. The climate change activist and award-winning writer will be the special guest for this year's Malta Book Festival on 7-11 November. "Year after year we are break- ing record sales and attend- ance rates for the Malta Book Festival, and this year round we are expecting to experience the biggest Malta Book Festi- val," National Book Council chairman Mark Camilleri told MaltaToday. "The Malta Book Festival is no longer just an event for book readers - it has become a major national and cultural event in the Maltese calendar." Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated col- umnist and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers, No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Poli- tics and Winning the World We Need (2017), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and No Logo (2000). No Is Not Enough was an in- stant New York Times best- seller, debuting at #2 on the Non-fiction list, and is be- ing translated into over 15 languages. It was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Non-Fiction in the US. This Changes Everything won the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non- fiction, was an Observer 'Book of the Year,' and a New York Times Book Review '100 No- table Books of the Year.' The New York Times called it: "A book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable … the most mo- mentous and contentious en- vironmental book since 'Silent Spring.'" The Shock Doctrine was pub- lished worldwide in 2007 and translated into over 25 lan- guages. It won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing and was a New York Times Critics' Pick of the Year. Rachel Mad- dow called The Shock Doctrine, "The only book of the last few years in American publishing that I would describe as a man- datory must-read." Naomi Klein's first book No Logo was translated into over 30 languages with more than a million copies in print. The New York Times called it "a movement bible". Since This Changes Every- thing was published, Klein's focus has been on putting its ideas into action. She is one of the organisers and authors of Canada's Leap Manifesto, a blueprint for a rapid and jus- tice-based transition off fossil fuels. The Leap has been endorsed by over 200 organisations, tens of thousands of individuals, and has inspired similar cli- mate justice initiatives around the world. Klein is a member of the board of directors for cli- mate-action group 350.org. In 2015, she was invited to speak at the Vatican to help launch Pope Francis's historic encycli- cal on ecology, Laudato si'. Klein will be interviewed in Malta by MaltaToday execu- tive editor Matthew Vella, who will discuss climate change and the political response to the environmental crisis, the rise of the far-right in mainstream politics in the United States and Europe, and the response of economic populism and the green-left movement. "None of the excuses can mask the dereliction of duty," Klein recently wrote in The Intercept. "It has always been possible for major media out- lets to decide, all on their own, that planetary destabilisation is a huge news story, very likely the most consequential of our time. They always had the ca- pacity to harness the skills of their reporters and photogra- phers to connect abstract sci- ence to lived extreme weather events. And if they did so consistently, it would lessen the need for journalists to get ahead of politics because the more informed the public is about both the threat and the tangible solutions, the more they push their elected repre- sentatives to take bold action." Klein has advanced a crucial argument that the fight against climate change is linked to the capitalist economies of major nations, and that the planet needs a democratic eco-social- ist vision, like that advanced by Bernie Sanders's presidential run. She says of candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, Kaniela Ing in Hawaii, and many more run- ning on platforms calling for a "Green New Deal" that these people identify as demo- cratic socialist, and rejectthe neoliberal centrism of "tepid 'market-based solutions' to the ecological crisis, as well as Donald Trump's all-out war on nature. And they are also presenting a concrete alterna- tive to the undemocratic ex- tractivist socialists of both the past and present. Perhaps most importantly, this new genera- tion of leaders isn't interested in scapegoating 'humanity' for the greed and corruption of a tiny elite. It seeks instead to help humanity – particularly its most systematically un- heard and uncounted mem- bers – to find their collective voice and power so they can stand up to that elite." "We aren't losing earth – but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new politi- cal path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to be- moan our lost decades. It's the moment to get the hell on that path." Her most recent book, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists (2018) was re- printed from her feature ar- ticle for The Intercept with all royalties donated to Junte- Gente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organisations resisting disaster capitalism and ad- vancing a fair and healthy re- covery for their island. "When I was in Puerto Rico, I met people from Detroit, Michi- gan, who were there to talk about the emergency manage- ment boards and the impacts on schools. People from New Orleans were there, sharing information about what had happened to their school sys- tem after Hurricane Katrina. I found that pretty moving and different – that these kinds of grassroots, community- to-community exchanges were happening so soon after the disaster," Klein told The Guardian. In September 2018, she was named the inaugural Glo- ria Steinem Chair for Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Naomi Klein will be at the Malta Book Festival on Friday 9 November at 8pm 'Earth is getting hot so fast… it will lose a great many of us' Acclaimed author, journalist and climate change activist Naomi Klein is In Malta on Friday 9 November for the Malta Book Festival