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Landmarks

Landmarks

Summary

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE

From the bestselling author of UNDERLAND, THE OLD WAYS and THE LOST WORDS

'Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly' Independent

Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather.

Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

'Enormously pleasurable, deeply moving. A bid to save our rich hoard of landscape language, and a blow struck for the power of a deep creative relationship to place' Financial Times

'A book that ought to be read by policymakers, educators, armchair environmentalists and active conservationists the world over' Guardian

Reviews

  • Publisher's description. The number one bestselling book from the author of The Old Ways. This is a celebration of the unique relationship between language and place; a field guide to nature writers from Roger Deakin to Nan Shepherd; and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable, poetic, funny, peculiar and endangered words to describe the natural world.
    Penguin

About the author

Robert Macfarlane

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.
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