Writer wins two awards for his work on landscape and nature.
Writer and academic Dr Robert Macfarlane received two prestigious awards this week in recognition for his novels.
The Royal Geographical Society has announced he is the recipient of its Ness Award in recognition of his work in communicating 'geography to a wide public by means of writing about nature, landscape and place'.
He has also won the Premio ITAS for mountain literature for The Old Ways, the third and final book in a loose trilogy of works about landscape and the imagination.
Dr Macfarlane, of Emmanuel College, teaches in the English Department and his research and writing interests include the nature-writing tradition, travel writing, originality and plagiarism, the relations of ecology and literature, the Anglo-American novel since World War II, contemporary poetry and Victorian environmentalism.
Well-known both as a critic and writer, his first book Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Granta: 2003), won The Guardian First Book Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award, and was filmed for BBC4.
Dr Macfarlane also writes regularly on literature, travel, nature and the environment for The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications.
This year, the RGS’s medals and awards recognised eighteen different people for their outstanding contributions to geography. Those honoured also included Professor Michael Batty and Paul Theroux who both received Royal Medals.