Robert Macfarlane

: "For the New Zealand politician see" Robert Macfarlane (New Zealand)Robert Macfarlane, (born 15 August 1976), is a British 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 was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It is an account of the development of Western attitudes to mountains and precipitous landscapes, 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 powerful and sometimes fatal hold that mountains can come to 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, Barry Lopez and Roger Deakin. He is seen as one of a group of British writers that has provoked a new critical and popular interest in writing about landscape [http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/call-of-the-wild-britains-nature-writers-870367.html] .

Macfarlane's interests in landscape, ecology and the environment have been transmitted through a series of newspaper and magazine essays, notably his 'Common Ground' series which was published in "The Guardian" in 2005. In 2004 he sat on the panel of judges for the Man Booker Prize, co-electing Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" as that year's winner, 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 wildness that remains in Britain and Ireland [cite book | title = The Wild Places | id = ISBN 1862079412 | pages = 340 | last = Macfarlane | first = Robert | date=2007 | publisher = Granta Books] . The book explores wildness both geographically and intellectually, testing different ideas of the wild against different landscapes, and describes Macfarlane's explorations of forests, moors, saltmarshes, mudflats, islands, sea-caves and city fringes. A condensed version of the book was broadcast as "Book of the Week" on BBC Radio 4 in September 2007. [ [http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/schedule/2007/09/03/day/ BBC Radio 4 schedule for 3 September 2007] Retrieved 2 October 2007.] In November 2007, the book won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, and in June 2008 it won the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book Of The Year Award. It became a hardback bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Dolman Best Travel Book Award, "The Sunday Times" Young Writer Of The Year Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Independent Booksellers' Award, and the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Book Of The Year Award.

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