Robert Macfarlane is a British writer, born in 1976, widely regarded as the finest nature and landscape essayist of his generation - a chronicler of wild places, old paths and the deep history beneath our feet.
A Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he teaches in the Faculty of English, he made his debut with Mountains of the Mind (2003), a history of how mountains came to grip the human imagination, which won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. It began a sequence of books that reshaped modern nature writing: The Wild Places, a search for what remains untamed in Britain and Ireland; The Old Ways, a journey along ancient tracks and holloways; and Landmarks, a celebration of the language of landscape.
His later work has ranged deeper and wider - Underland, a 'deep time journey' through the worlds beneath the surface, won the Wainwright Prize - and reached new readers through The Lost Words, an illustrated 'spell book' made with the artist Jackie Morris to revive the nature words being dropped from children's dictionaries.
Married to the historian Julia Lovell, he writes prose of unusual lyric precision, alert always to how landscape shapes language and memory, and how both are threatened.
