A literacy of the land: a conversation with Robert Macfarlane
Award-winning writer and Cambridge scholar Robert Macfarlane will engage in a conversation with Professor Nathan Hensley about his work on nature, place, landscape, travel, people and language, with a nod to the authors who influenced his writing.
From his first book Mountains of the Mind (2003; The Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award) to The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words (2017) and Underland (2019), Robert Macfarlane has fostered a new critical and popular interest in the environment and ecology. He has also explored those themes through essays—as the 2005 Common Ground series in The Guardian–and reportage (in Granta and Archipelago).
Macfarlane collaborated with cinematographer Renan Ozturk, director Jen Peedom, and composer Richard Tognetti for the production of the film Mountain (2017) which won three Australian Academy Awards. Together with Oscar-nominated composer Hauschka and director Rob Petit, he also produced the film Upstream (2019) set in the Scottish Cairngorm mountains.
In 2017 he received the E. M. Forster Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.