Background

Robert Macfarlane was born on August 15, 1976, in Oxford, United Kingdom.

Education

Robert studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge and at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Career

Macfarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, was published in 2003 and won the Guardian First Book Award and was filmed by the BBC. It is an account of the development of Western attitudes to mountains and precipitous landscapes and takes its title from a line by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. His next book, The Wild Places, was published in 2007 and won the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. It describes a series of journeys made in search of the wildness that remains in Britain and Ireland.

The Old Ways was published in 2012 and was acclaimed as a ‘tour de force’ by William Dalrymple in The Observer. It describes the years Macfarlane spent following 'old ways' in south-east England, north-west Scotland, Spain, Sichuan, and Palestine. It won the Premio ITAS Prize for Mountain Writing, was joint winner of the Dolman Prize for Travel Writing, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Jan Michalski Prize for World Literature, as well as eight other prizes.

Robert wrote Holloway in 2013 with Dan Richards and Stanley Donwood. His next book Landmarks, that celebrates and defends the language of landscape, was a number one bestseller, which won the Hay Medal for Prose and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2015. The Lost Words: A Spell Book, on which he collaborated with Jackie Morris, seeks to get the language of nature back into the mouths and the minds’-eyes of children. It was chosen by the nation as one of its favorite books on the natural world of all time. Macfarlane's most recent work Underland, about the lost worlds beneath our feet, is due for publication in June 2019.

Robert's interests in topography, ecology and the environment have been explored not only in his books but also through essays, notably his Common Ground series which was published in The Guardian in 2005. He has also published many reportages and travel essays in magazines, especially Granta and Archipelago, as well as numerous introductory essays to re-issues of lost and neglected classics of landscape and nature writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notably J. A. Baker and Nan Shepherd.

His books have been widely adapted for film, television, and radio, and Macfarlane has collaborated with many artists, photographers, and musicians including Stanley Donwood and Johnny Flynn.

Robert is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

Achievements

• Robert Macfarlane is a best-selling, multi-award-winning author who is internationally renowned for his writing on landscape, memory, place and nature. He is best known for his books The Old Ways, Mountains of the Mind and The Lost Words. He received The EM Forster Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

    (In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets ...)

    2012
  • The Lost Words

    (In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictiona...)

    2018
  • Underland: A Deep Time Journey

    (In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers his masterpiece:...)

    2019
  • Landmarks

    (#1 bestseller on the UK Sunday Times list, from the accla...)

    2015
  • Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit

    (Three centuries ago, mountains were considered forbidding...)

    2003
  • The Wild Places 2007
  • Gifts Of Reading 2016

Interests

• Travelling