Promotional Information

An autobiographical essay on the importance of giving and receiving books - from the bestselling author of Landmarks and The Old Ways.

About the Author

Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe.

Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Macfarlane and Morris's latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026.

Reviews

I'll read anything Macfarlane writes
*David Mitchell, author of 'Cloud Atlas'*

[Macfarlane] can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas transcend the physical region he explores
*New York Times Book Review*

[Macfarlane] is a godfather of a cultural moment
*Sunday Times on Landmarks*