Klein will be in Dublin to speak about her new book, The Shock Doctrine, which riffs on some of the themes of her massive-selling 2000 debut, No Logo. Both books examine the bad side of capitalism with the latest focusing on how private companies make massive profits from disaster zones like Iraq and post-Katrina New Orleans.

Klein is a great interviewee. She explains complex ideas easily without dumbing them down. She isn't nearly as polemical as that other critic of corporate America, Michael Moore. It's difficult to disagree with a lot of what she says . . . is anyone really going to speak out and say that Asian sweatshops are a good thing? She has become the acceptable face of anti-corporate America criticism with her impeccably researched facts on how big brands insidiously work their way into our lives. The fact that she's sleek and pretty rather than grungy and angry like some in the antiglobalisation movement may play a part in making her message more palatable.

The 37-year-old has said that she wants to be known for her work rather than her personality, and so in interviews she will talk at length about how Nike and Starbucks sell lifestyles rather than products to customers but will never delve too deeply into her personal life.

Klein was born in Canada in 1970 where her father was a doctor and her mother was to become a feminist film-maker.

They had moved to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War and were outspoken activists on many issues. To go against her hippie parents, Klein's form of teenage rebellion was to become obsessed with shopping and brand names. She would stitch little alligators on to her T-shirts so they would look like Lacoste, had a Saturday job in Esprit and her fights with her parents were over the price of designer jeans. Her grandfather had been a Marxist and was the first man to call a strike at the Disney studios, but Klein was described in her high-school yearbook as the girl 'most likely to be in jail for stealing peroxide'.

She was a marketer's dream, until she went to college and her radical roots reasserted themselves. She has described the mass shooting at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in December 1989 as a pivotal moment that changed her perceptions. A male student who had missed out on a place in the engineering faculty in the university walked in to a class, separated the men from the women and shot 14 female students dead, saying that he was 'fighting feminism' as he did so. Klein, who was a student at the University of Toronto at the time, took it as a wake-up call and became involved in student activism on campus, most notably in the area of gender equality.

She became editor of the college paper and later left college in the middle of her degree to work as a journalist. When she came back to finish her degree aged 25, she found a growing anger among the students at the increasing influence of big businesses in their college lives, and she began to develop the foundations for No Logo.

She continued to work as a journalist after she finished college and, using her weekly column in the Toronto Star, she documented and examined the problems that she had with these big corporations.

Her research for her first book was exhaustive. She travelled to sweatshops in Asia, met with anti-globalisation protesters from across the world and compiled a staggering array of facts and figures (one of the most quoted is how Nike paid Michael Jordan more money to endorse trainers for it in 1992 ($20m) than it paid its entire 30,000-strong workforce in Indonesia that year).

No Logowas also lucky with its timing. It had just been sent to the printers when the massive protests broke out at the World Trade Organsiation (WTO) talks in Seattle in 1999. It arrived at the perCV Name: Naomi Klein Born: Montreal, 1970 Occupation: Writer and activist.

Author of No Logo (2000) and The Shock Doctrine (2007) In the news because: Klein will be going head-to-head with David McWilliams in a public interview this Friday in Dublin's Crawdaddy.

fect time to crest the wave of anti-globalisation. Described as the 'Das Kapital of the anti-corporate movement', the book became a bible for those involved in the movement and an eye-opener for people who would not normally be interested in books about big business or activism.

No Logo has sold over a million copies, has been translated into over 20 languages and remains massively influential. It made Klein a star. She appeared on talk shows, gave countless interviews and began to write a regular column in The Guardian that is widely syndicated.

The anti-globalisation movement was silenced somewhat by the events of 11 September 2001, however. In the aftermath of the attacks, criticism of big corporations was seen as 'un-American' by vocal right-wing commentators and the movement lost its focus somewhat.

Earlier this month, Klein blamed the 'Bono-isation of protest' for 'reducing discussion to a much safer terrain', leading to the fizzling out of the movement. "This gentrification of the protest space by the Bonos and the Geldofs has had a really corrosive effect, " she said.

"[Protests are] less dangerous and less powerful now."

Seven years after No Logo, her second book was published last month. In The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism, she suggests that governments and private corporations have used disasters to push through laissez-faire market reforms before local populations can recover from the shock. More overtly political than No Logo, the book is already appearing on bestseller lists around the world.

Criticisms of Klein have often tended towards personal attacks rather than questioning of her theses. In 2002, The Economist crankily described her as having 'all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent'. Less eloquently, a comment on her MySpace page from an American undergraduate typifies a kind of response she must be used to, suggesting that since she doesn't seem to like America all that much, she should go and live in China.

For someone who is among the most high-profile critics of capitalism in the world, she bears little physical resemblance to the foot-soldiers of the movement that used No Logo as its bible. She is pretty in that all-American wellgroomed way. She is married to Avi Lewis, a successful TV talk-show host in Canada. She has said in an interview that they got married 'so we could have a big party' and, rather improbably, that they don't wear wedding rings so that they're not 'branded'.

Her talk in Dublin will provide a chance to see the rabid anti-capitalist spar with a rabid pro-capitalist. Her hippie parents must be proud . . . Naomi Klein might just be reviving activism for a new generation.