Robert Macfarlane (travel writer)
| Robert Macfarlane | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 15, 1976 Halam, Nottinghamshire |
| Education | Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford. |
| Occupation | Travel writer |
| Notable work | Mountains of the Mind; The Wild Places; The Old Ways; Landmarks |
Robert Macfarlane (born 15 August 1976) is a British writer.
Macfarlane was born in Halam, Nottinghamshire and attended Nottingham High School. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He began his PhD at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2000, and in 2001 was elected a Fellow of the College. In 2012 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is a founding Trustee of the charity Action For Conservation.
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's heroes include the mountaineer George Mallory, and its influences include the writing of Simon Schama and Francis Spufford.
Macfarlane's second book was Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature, which was published in March 2007. Exploring the difference between creation and invention, the book surveys the "borrowedness" of much Victorian literature, focusing on the writings of George Eliot, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, among others.
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