Is A River Alive?

Robert Macfarlane is the bestselling author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland, and co-creator of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. The Lost Words won the Books Are My Bag Beautiful Book Award and the Hay Festival Book of the Year. Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times. He is now working on his third book with long-time collaborator, Jackie Morris: The Book of Birds.>

Auteur
Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. As a lyricist and performer, he has written albums and songs with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023). In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is currently completing his third book with Jackie Morris: The Lost Birds.

Texte du rabat

From the celebrated writer and observer Robert Macfarlane comes this brilliant, perspective-shifting new book - which answers a resounding yes to the question of its titleAt its heart is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings - who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Inspired by the activists, artists and lawmakers of the young 'Rights of Nature' movement, Macfarlane takes the reader on an exhilarating exploration of the past, present and futures of this ancient, urgent concept. Is a River Alive? flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys:The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is under way. The third is to north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river - the Mutehekau or Magpie - is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream who rises a mile from Macfarlane's house, and flows through his own years and days. Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is a River Alive? is at once Macfarlane's most personal and most political book to date. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. Lit throughout by other minds and voices, it invites us radically to reimagine not only rivers but also life itself. At the centre of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers - and always has. 'He is the great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation' Wall Street Journal'A naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach far transcend the physical region he explores' The New York Times Book Review