Robert Macfarlane

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For the New Zealand politician see Robert Macfarlane (New Zealand)

Robert Macfarlane, (born 15 August 1976), is a travel writer, cultural historian, and literary critic. Educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

Macfarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was published in 2003 and won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. It is a history of Western attitudes to mountains, and takes its title from a line by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Macfarlane's book combines history with first-person narrative. He considers why people are drawn to mountains despite their obvious dangers, and examines the hold mountains have over the imagination. The book owes an undisguised debt to the writings of Simon Schama and Francis Spufford, and its heroes include the mountaineer George Mallory.

Macfarlane is the inheritor of a tradition of nature writing which includes John Muir, Richard Jefferies and William Cobbett, as well as contemporary figures such as John McPhee and Barry Lopez.

Macfarlane's environmental concerns have been transmitted through a series of newspaper and magazine essays, notably in The Guardian. In 2004 he sat on the panel of judges for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2005 he guest-edited and introduced The Mays anthology of new writing.

His second book The Wild Places was published in 2007. In it he embarks on a series of journeys in search of the wilderness that remains in Britain and Ireland ^[1]. A condensed version of the book was broadcast as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 in September 2007.^[2] In November 2007, the book won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature.

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