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 Underland (2019), an exploration of subterranean spaces and deep time. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and adapted for film, television, stage, and radio.

Macfarlane has expanded beyond traditional publishing through multimedia collaborations. He worked with director Jen Peedom on Mountain (2017), narrated by Willem Dafoe, which became the highest-grossing Australian documentary and won three Academy Awards. A subsequent collaboration produced River (2022). His musical partnerships include albums with Johnny Flynn and work with Cosmo Sheldrake and Karine Polwart.

His early academic scholarship, particularly Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007), examined theories of literary originality and argued for prioritizing “inventive reuse” over creation “from nothing.” This foundation in literary theory informs his nature writing approach, where he frequently draws upon and recontextualizes historical texts and traditional knowledge systems.

The publication of Is a River Alive? in 2025 represents both continuity and evolution in Macfarlane’s work. The book immediately achieved commercial success, becoming both a New York Times bestseller and #1 Sunday Times (UK) bestseller, while receiving recognition from major publications including The New Yorker, Financial Times, Guardian, and Washington Post. The book builds upon themes throughout Macfarlane’s career while engaging more directly with legal and political frameworks. His adoption of anthropomorphic grammar represents a linguistic experiment in recognizing natural entities as subjects rather than objects, reflecting his long-standing interest in how language shapes environmental perception.

Macfarlane has received significant recognition, including the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017) and the inaugural Weston International Award for career achievement in non-fiction (2023). He has been mentioned as an outside contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His work is associated with a generation of British writers who have reinvigorated public interest in landscape and nature writing, though this movement has faced criticism for targeting a primarily metropolitan audience. Macfarlane’s response involves deepening engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems and environmental justice issues, as evidenced in Is a River Alive? through partnerships with activists and legal advocates working on rights of nature legislation. The book’s focus on legal personhood for rivers connects Macfarlane’s literary practice with contemporary environmental law and Indigenous rights movements, positioning his work within broader discussions about decolonizing environmental thought and developing new frameworks for human-nature relationships.