We give new examples of compact, negatively curved Einstein manifolds of dimension 4. These are seemingly the first such examples which are not locally homogeneous. Our metrics are carried by a sequence of 4-manifolds (X k ) previously considered by Gromov and Thurston [19]. The construction begins with a certain sequence (M k ) of hyperbolic 4-manifolds, each containing a totally geodesic surface Σ k which is nullhomologous and whose normal injectivity radius tends to infinity with k. For a fixed choice of natural number l, we consider the l-fold cover X k → M k branched along Σ k . We prove that for any choice of l and all large enough k (depending on l), X k carries an Einstein metric of negative sectional curvature. The first step in the proof is to find an approximate Einstein metric on X k , which is done by interpolating between a model Einstein metric near the branch locus and the pull-back of the hyperbolic metric from M k . The second step in the proof is to perturb this to a genuine solution to Einstein's equations, by a parameter dependent version of the inverse function theorem. The analysis relies on a delicate bootstrap procedure based on L 2 coercivity estimates.