British author Robert Macfarlane has won the inaugural Weston International Award, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.Bryan Appleyard/Supplied
Robert Macfarlane, whose 2003 debut book Mountains of the Mind was an inquiry into the human fascination with climbing towering rock and ice, has reached another peak. The British author has won the inaugural Weston International Award for career achievement in non-fiction, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
The new annual award is worth $75,000 to Macfarlane, a fellow of Emmanuel College and a professor of literature and environmental humanities at the University of Cambridge. His books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, published over the past 20 years, include The Gifts of Reading, Landmarks, The Old Ways and The Wild Places.
Arriving at an appropriate metaphor, the jury for the prize said Macfarlane writes, “in prose as clear and flowing as a mountain stream.”
One of his most notable works is 2017′s The Lost Words, a collection of poems and illustrations with author-artist Jackie Morris that the Guardian newspaper called “a cultural phenomenon.” It was published in response to the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s dropping of such words as acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter and willow, after they were deemed no longer used enough by children to merit their place in the resource. Macfarlane and Morris set out to make a “spell book” to conjure back 20 of the lost words.
The Lost Words won the British Book Awards’ Children’s Book of the Year in 2018. Other prizes won by Macfarlane include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award for Literature and, in 2008, the Banff Mountain Book Festival’s grand prize for The Wild Places.
The 46-year-old Nottinghamshire native also wrote the documentary films River and Mountain (both narrated by actor Willem Dafoe) and composed the libretto to Untrue Island, a jazzy work of text and music inspired by Orford Ness, a strip of marshland off the Suffolk coast of England once used to test bombs and spy on the Soviet Union. The piece was performed in a former nuclear-weapons storage site on Orford Ness.
The Weston International Award joins the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, now in its 13th year and also valued at $75,000. Both are supported by the Toronto-based Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation. To be eligible for the award, an author must have published at least three books of outstanding literary merit in the genre of non-fiction, written in English or widely available in translation.
The winning author will appear at a ticketed event, An Evening with Robert Macfarlane, to be held at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on Sept. 18.
Brad Wheeler