Robert Macfarlane (Halam, UK, 1976) is one of the most outstanding practitioners of nature writing today, with a body of work that focuses on places and the people who inhabit them. His work has won many awards and has also been very successful with the reading public. His first book, Mountains of the Mind, a journey through our fascination with mountains, was a bestseller, winning the Guardian First Book Award and was The New York Times and The Economist book of the year. Since then he has published The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Underland and other books. His work has been translated into several other languages, and he has written for film, television, radio and the theatre and his words have been set to music. In 2017 he won the EM Forster Award for Literature, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2019 his latest book, Underland, won the Wainwright Prize, one of the most prestigious book prizes for nature and travel writing. He also works as a lecturer and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.