Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane (Halam, 1976) is a writer who studied at Oxford and Cambridge and has ended up teaching at Emmanuel College of the latter university. He is considered to be one of the key authors of nature writing and has published such bestsellers as Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (in Spanish, Las montañas de la mente, Literatura Random House, 2020), a cultural history of mountain peaks and winner of the 2003 Guardian First Book Award 2003, and The Wild Places (in Spanish, Naturaleza virgen, Alba Editorial, 2008), in which he describes his expeditions in remote areas of Britain and Ireland. His books, which have been translated into many languages with numerous film and television adaptations, have won the most prestigious awards of the genre, among them the E. M. Forster Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Together with writers like Nan Shepherd, Annie Dillard, and Rebecca Solnit, he is deemed to be one of the leading figures in the resurgence of interest in nature writing. In his most recent book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (in Catalan, Sota terra, Angle Editorial / Literatura Random House, 2020), he describes his descents into the depths of the earth and of time with a series of reports on subjects ranging from prehistoric funeral chambers, nuclear waste repositories, prehistoric paintings in sea caves of the Arctic, labyrinthine catacombs in Paris, undersea salt mines, through to grottos that are almost infinite.