Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked and author of the green satire Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2008. He started his career in journalism at spiked‘s predecessor, Living Marxism, then its successor LM, until it was forced to close in 2000 following a notorious libel action brought by ITN.

When he’s not writing for and editing spiked, and commissioning journalists who have something to say and the guts to say it, O’Neill writes widely for publications on both sides of the Atlantic. His journalism has been published in the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Guardian, The Sunday Times, the British Journalism Review, the Press Gazette and the Catholic Herald in Britain, and in Salon, Slate, the Chicago Sun-Times, the American Prospect, the American Conservative and Reason magazine in the United States. He is also a feature-writer for the Christian Science Monitor in America and for the BBC in Britain.

O’Neill has also been a guest on numerous TV and radio shows in Britain, Ireland and America, including on BBC radio and TV, Sky News, Channel 4 News and The Last Word on More4; The Big Bite on RTE television in Ireland and Talk Radio in Dublin; and on the Heartland show on Fox News and International Correspondents on CNN, and radio stations in New York, San Francisco, Colorado, Wisconsin and Washington, DC. He has given talks at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Oxford Literary Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art. He was depicted in the play An Explosion, which explored the meaning of terrorism, at the Battersea Arts Centre in London in 2006 (O’Neill was played by actor Jim Pyke). O’Neill also founded and taught the Online Journalism course at the University College for the Creative Arts in Surrey, England.

In his writing, O’Neill coined the terms ‘dodgy dossier’ (to describe Blair’s first dossier on Iraq, the one published in September 2002 which most journalists accepted as good coin), ‘Blairpop’ to describe today’s conformist rock’n’roll, and ‘celebrity colonialism’, in reference to celebrities’ exploitation of African states for their own gratification (which now features in the Official Dictionary of Unofficial English).

He has been described as a ‘smug shite’ by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, as ‘exceptionally ignorant’ by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, and ‘entertaining in a Julie Burchill kind of way’ by Richard Sanderson of the Little Atoms radio show. He is a passionate defender of free speech, and was one of few British journalists to attack the Austrian authorities for imprisoning David Irving on charges of Holocaust denial; he has also argued against the censorship of homophobic Jamaican dancehall singers by the British police and their ‘gay best friends’. Nadine Strossen, then President of the American Civil Liberties Union, described O’Neill’s site, spiked, as ‘one of those rare publications that defends free speech even when it is difficult and unfashionable to do so’.