Naomi Klein

She married Avi Lewis, a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker, and the couple has a son, Toma.

Naomi Klein was born into a political family in Montreal, Quebec. Her mother, Bonnie Sherr Klein, became known for directing an anti-pornographic film, ‘Not a Love Story’ and her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of the ‘Physicians for Social Responsibility’.

As a child, she was drawn to advertisements and brand names and spent a large amount of her time in shopping malls. She was obsessed with designer labels and was also awed by the outsized logos of big corporations and food joints.

Just before getting she joined the University of Toronto, her mother suffered a serious stroke and had to be looked after, which severely hampered Klein’s education for a year.

The following year, at the age of 18, she enrolled at the University of Toronto, where another event, brought change and sadness to her life. In 1989, over a dozen female engineering students were massacred in an open-fire at the ‘Ecole Polytechnique’. This altered her life in so many ways and it proved to be a wake-up call for the ‘feminist’ in her.

Her writing career began when she contributed columns to ‘The Varsity’, a student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. She dropped out of university in her third year and took up a job at the ‘Toronto Globe and Mail’, which was followed by an editorship at ‘This Magazine’.

She became a feminist activist and through the 1980s, she campaigned on a wide variety of issues related to gender prominence and social reforms, which in turn, got her a number of rape and death threats. However, she remained undeterred and continued to her voice her opinions.

In 1995, she returned to the university with the hope of finishing her degree but left the institution for a journalism internship, which eventually helped her become a journalist for ‘The Nation’ and ‘The Guardian’.

In 2000, she authored ‘No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies’, which became an international phenomenon and earned her widespread recognition. In 2002, she published ‘Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate’, a collection of many of her previous works.

In 2004, along with her husband Avi Lewis, she released a documentary, ‘The Take’, centered on the plight of unemployed works in Argentina. This went on to become a huge success and threw light on her filmmaking abilities along with her passion for humanitarian efforts.

The book, ‘No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies’, authored by Naomi Klein in 2000, is an international bestseller, translated into more than twenty eight languages, with over a million copies available in print. It has become one of the most influential books about the ‘alter-globalization’ movement and has even won prestigious awards.

‘The Shock Doctrine: Rise of Disaster Capitalism’, published worldwide in 2007, is considered her magnum opus and has been translated into seventeen languages to date. Following the publication of this book, she has been recognized as ‘the most visible and influential figure on the American left’ and was also awarded a cash prize for the same.