Robert Macfarlane Books in Order

Edited by Robert Macfarlane, this anthology gathers five centuries of poetry associated with Magdalen College, Oxford. Poems and accompanying biographical material bring writers from different periods together through their shared connection with the college.

Macfarlane explores why mountains came to fascinate the Western imagination despite the dangers of climbing them. Cultural history, geology and his own journeys trace the changing desire to reach summits, culminating in the story of George Mallory’s Everest expeditions.

Macfarlane examines how nineteenth-century writers understood originality and borrowed from one another. Moving through literature, criticism and other intellectual traditions, he traces changing attitudes to plagiarism and shows how those debates became creative resources within Victorian writing.

Seeking wildness in Britain and Ireland, Macfarlane walks, climbs and swims through remote and overlooked landscapes. Nights spent outdoors and encounters with local histories lead him to question what a wild place is and why such places matter.

Journeys into Dorset’s sunken paths connect Macfarlane’s earlier walk with Roger Deakin to a later return with Dan Richards and Stanley Donwood. Their collaborative account explores the landscape’s shadows, layered history and the traces of those who have travelled through it.

Following ancient paths across Britain and beyond, Macfarlane explores how walking connects landscape, memory and imagination. Tracks, sea routes and hollowed lanes become guides to the people, rituals and stories that continue to inhabit apparently familiar ground.

Exploring the relationship between language and landscape, Macfarlane gathers regional words for land, weather and wildlife. Journeys through Britain and Ireland and encounters with nature writers show how precise vocabulary can deepen attention, knowledge and attachment to place.

On a remote shingle island, the Armourer conducts a ritual with destructive intent inside a ruined chapel. Five more-than-human forms move toward him across landscape and time, converging into a force determined to reclaim the island.

Poems and watercolour images draw attention to familiar plants and animals, from foxes and birches to jackdaws. Macfarlane and Morris use the language of spells to renew readers’ sense of wonder and connection with an easily overlooked natural world.

A father and son walk through a changing landscape in a lyrical picture book about nature and hope. Their shared journey uses rhythm and imagery to imagine possibilities for the world they inhabit and the future awaiting them.

Travelling to threatened rivers in Ecuador, India and Canada, Macfarlane explores the idea that waterways are living beings. Reportage and natural history connect their environmental struggles with efforts to recognise rivers differently in human imagination and law.

An illustrated panorama explores the plants, animals and fungi of Ecuador’s Los Cedros Cloud Forest. Created with the forest named as a collaborator, the book connects its biodiversity with efforts to recognise nature’s rights and protect its future.

Macfarlane’s lyrical essays and Jackie Morris’s artwork explore the lives of nearly fifty increasingly threatened birds. Habits, songs, nesting, cultural stories and encounters with people form a field guide concerned with recognising kinship as well as identifying species.

Robert Macfarlane's acrostic poems and Jackie Morris's paintings celebrate twenty names from the natural world that disappeared from a children's dictionary. Birds, plants, and animals become subjects for close attention, inviting readers to rediscover the language of nearby nature.

Traveling through caves, glaciers, ancient burial sites, and other hidden environments, Robert Macfarlane investigates the worlds beneath our feet. His encounters connect geology and ecological relationships with human memory, mortality, and responsibility for the planet's distant future.