This is reflected in the organisation of the books themselves, where chapters are arranged according to different types of land (moors, capes, ridges), matter (chalk, silt and limestone) and topography (tracks, paths, waters running north and south.) He writes, in the note to the appropriately titled The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), that it is a book which ‘could not have been written standing still’, a project where ‘thinking’ was ‘only possible on foot’. Whilst this work is steeped in Macfarlane’s academic interests in post-pastoral landscapes and the literary traditions which precede him, it is experientially grounded in the ‘wild’ places, locales beyond the interiors of the library or the lecture-hall. His string of best-selling and prize-winning books over the past fifteen years, beginning with 2003’s Mountains of the Mind, have cemented his reputation as a leading voice in the field of contemporary nature writing. Robert Macfarlane also writes travel essays, as well as articles on literature and the environment for publications including Granta, Harper's, The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement.Īlthough he is a Cambridge professor by trade, and a figurehead for modern, public-facing academia, Robert Macfarlane is best known for his forays outdoors. His most recent book, Landmarks (2015) is 'a field guide to the literature of nature', collecting a glossary of terms used in different British dialects to describe terrain.

He is generally grouped with a number of recent British authors who have provoked a new critical and popular interest in writing about landscape and nature. Both books have won multiple awards including the 2003 Guardian First Book Award, a 2004 Somerset Maugham Award and the 2004 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award ( Mountains of the Mind) and the 2007 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, and the 2008 Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award( The Wild Places). He is the author of two well-known books about landscape and nature: Mountains of the Mind (2003), which examines the development of our attitudes to mountains and how they fire our imaginations and The Wild Places (2007), which explores the remaining wild places of Britain and Ireland, and our continuing need for 'wildness'. He studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge and at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is currently a Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Robert Macfarlane was born in Oxford in 1976 and is a travel writer, nature writer and critic.

The old ways a journey on foot