罗伯特·麦克法兰

罗伯特·麦克法兰（英语：Robert Macfarlane，1976年8月15日—）是一位英国旅行作家，任职于剑桥大学伊曼纽尔学院，主要作品有《念念远山》（Mountains of the Mind）、《荒野之地》（The Wild Places）、《古道》（The Old Ways）等。

Robert Macfarlane (born 15 August 1976) is a British non-fiction writer, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Macfarlane is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, which include The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words (2017), Underland (2019) and Is a River Alive? (2025), and for his many collaborations with musicians, composers and artists.

In 2017, Macfarlane received The E. M. Forster Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2022 and 2024, he was named as an outside contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Prize in those years was won by Annie Ernaux and Han Kang respectively.

Macfarlane is married to professor of modern Chinese history and literature Julia Lovell.

Early life and education

Robert Macfarlane was born in Halam in Nottinghamshire, where he attended Nottingham High School.

Macfarlane's father, John Macfarlane, is a respiratory physician who co-authored the CURB-65 score of pneumonia in 2003. His brother, James Macfarlane, is also a consultant physician in respiratory medicine. One grandfather was the British diplomat and mountaineer Edward Peck; the other was radar scientist and pioneer George G. Macfarlane.

Macfarlane was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He began a PhD at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2000, and in 2001 was elected a Fellow of the college.

He is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge; a founding member of the MOTH (More Than Human) Life Collective, 'an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, non-humans and the web of life that sustains us all', based out of New York University's School of Law; and in 2026 he was appointed to the Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo.

Background

Macfarlane is a nature writer in the broadest sense, part of a tradition of writing about landscape, place, travel, and nature that includes John Muir, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, as well as contemporary figures like John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Macfarlane's friend Roger Deakin. He is associated with other walker-writers, including Patrick Leigh Fermor, Nan Shepherd and Laurie Lee, and seen as one of a number of recent British writers who have provoked a new critical and popular interest in writing about landscape. His interests in topography, ecology and the environment have been explored in his books, and also through essays, notably his Common Ground series, which was published in The Guardian in 2005.

Macfarlane has also published many reportage and travel essays in magazines, especially Granta and Archipelago, as well as numerous introductory essays to reissues of lost and neglected classics of landscape and nature writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notably J. A. Baker (The Peregrine) and Nan Shepherd (The Living Mountain and In The Cairngorms).

Books

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. The book asks why people, including Macfarlane, 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 Irish Times described the book as "a new kind of exploration writing, perhaps even the birth of a new genre, which demands a new category of its own."