Is a River Alive?

Robert Macfarlane was born in 1976, in Halam, Nottinghamshire, and educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College Cambridge, and Magdalen College Oxford. After teaching in Beijing, he returned to Cambridge for his PhD at Emmanuel College, where he was elected Fellow in 2001. Currently Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at Cambridge’s Faculty of English, he teaches courses spanning environmental humanities, the Anthropocene, and landscape writing.

Macfarlane’s passion for outdoor activities began early. His mountaineering experiences ranged from age six until 1999, when he lost his nerve during a precarious Alpine crossing, which marked a turning point that redirected his focus toward writing about imaginative relationships with places rather than physical conquest.

His literary breakthrough came with Mountains of the Mind (2003), published when he was 26. The book won the Guardian First Book Award, Somerset Maugham Award, and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, establishing him as a significant voice in contemporary nature writing. This began what he describes as a sort of trilogy which continued with The Wild Places (2007) and The Old Ways (2012).

Subsequent publications include Landmarks (2015), exploring language and landscape; The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020), collaborative works with artist Jackie Morris restoring nature vocabulary to children’s dictionaries; and