Paul Molyneaux


Born in 1958, Paul Molyneaux, grew up in Pennsylvania and spend most of his youth in the woods of Delaware, Montgomery, and Berks counties. At 17 years old he left home and went to sea as a commercial fisherman. In 2010, looking out from a wooded ridge on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania, he said: “I realize now that the reason I went to sea was because it was the last wilderness. But here in these woods is where it all started.”

During his twenty-five year career on the water, Molyneaux worked in numerous areas: from fisheries development consultant to Native Peoples in Maine and Alaska, to harpooning swordfish on Georges Bank. After earning a degree in Fisheries and Marine Technology from the University of Rhode Island in 1985, he walked away from the industrial sector and fished from a dory (an ocean worthy rowboat) for ten years. In 1997 he earned a BA in Writing and Literature from Goddard College.

Since 1998 Molyneaux has been writing about the political, socio-economic, and environmental aspects of fisheries and aquaculture for The New York Times, National Fisherman, and other publications. He is the author of two books, The Doryman’s Reflection: A Fisherman’s Life (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), and Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans (TMP, 2007).

As a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship winner, Molyneaux spent a year researching sustainable fisheries practices in India, Chile, Iceland and several other countries, and has a finished manuscript currently being prepared for publication.

The Barbarian Utopia will actually be Molyneaux’s fourth book. He and his wife and their two children split their time between Maine, and Sonora, Mexico (and more recently, the Appalachian Trail.)