Robert Macfarlane is the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award. He writes about humans, landscapes, and the living world. His six nonfiction books, published over the past twenty years — from Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003) through to the acclaimed Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) — place him at the forefront of contemporary writers seeking new ways of illuminating and communicating the complex, urgent questions of relations between people and nature.

His books — which also include The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015) and The Gifts of Reading (2016) — have been translated into thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for music, film, television, radio, and theatre. He has also written films including River (2022) and Mountain (2017), both narrated by Willem Dafoe, and collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Johnny Flynn.

Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College and a Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge. In 2017 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forster Prize for Literature. His current book project, forthcoming in 2025, is entitled Is a River Alive?, and — he has said — is “about the lives and deaths of rivers, the global Rights of Nature movement, and the new-old idea that the world is far more alive than is allowed.”