Robert Macfarlane Audiobooks

Is a River Alive? Nature writing that listens to land and language alike

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Who is Robert Macfarlane?

Robert Macfarlane, born in 1976, is a British writer and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with a fair claim to being the defining nature writer of his generation. His books on landscape, nature, place, people and language include The Old Ways, Landmarks, The Lost Words, Underland and Is a River Alive? – a body of work that has made the meeting point of land and language his signature territory.

The recognition is substantial. The American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him its E. M. Forster Award for Literature in 2017, and in both 2022 and 2024 he was named as an outside contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. For a writer whose subjects are supposedly the quiet ones – paths, words, rivers – that is company few of his peers keep.

Robert Macfarlane in audiobooks

Is a River Alive?, from 2025, is the Macfarlane in our catalogue, and the question in its title is asked in earnest. Few writers pay closer attention to the language we use about the natural world – this is, after all, the author of Landmarks and The Lost Words – and that sensitivity to the sound and weight of words makes him a natural fit for audio.

Prose this attentive to rhythm rewards being heard rather than skimmed, and a book asking whether a river lives is, at bottom, a book about listening. For UK listeners who walk, swim or simply think about landscape, this is contemporary nature writing at its most ambitious – the work of a writer twice tipped for the Nobel.