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Naomi Klein (born 1970) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist. She was born in Montreal, Quebec, and now lives in Toronto.
Klein wrote the book No Logo (2000), which became a manifesto of the anti-globalization movement. She has also written Fences and Windows (2002) and contributes to The Nation, In These Times, Canada's The Globe and Mail, and This Magazine, and The Guardian in Britain.
No Logo is her best-known work, where she lambastes the negative effects of brand-oriented consumer culture. What makes No Logo especially relevant was that it was released only a month after mass anti-globalization protests in Seattle shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting.
In No Logo, Klein describes the operations of large corporations which exist only to peddle a brand. Their products, she argues, turn people into walking billboards. On a more subtle note, these corporations are often guilty of exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of ever-greater profits. Klein criticized Nike so much in the book that it became one of the first publications to receive feedback from Nike.
Since No Logo, she has continued to write on various emerging issues, such as the invasion of Iraq. In a September 2004 article for Harper's Magazine entitled "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia", she argues that, contrary to popular belief and criticisms, the Bush Administration did have a clear plan for post-invasion Iraq, which was to build a fully unconstrained free market economy. She describes plans to allow foreigners to extract wealth from Iraq, and the methods used to achieve those goals.
Her writing career started early, contributing to The Varsity, one of the University of Toronto's student newspapers. Klein is married to Canadian television journalist Avi Lewis.
Klein spoke at the annual Dalton K. Camp Lecture in Journalism on October 28, 2004 at Saint Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
She also spoke at the tenth anniversary celebration of Stauffer Library at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario on November 4, 2004, and at the Navigating A New World Conference on November 6, along with Lloyd Axworthy, Linda McQuaig, Roméo Dallaire, Thomas Homer-Dixon, and Irshad Manji.
Also in 2004, Klein and Lewis released a documentary called The Take, which profiled a group of laid off auto-parts workers in Argentina who took back control of their plant and turned it into a cooperative.
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