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Robert Macfarlane wins inaugural $75k Weston International Award
Robert Macfarlane has won the inaugural $75,000 Weston International Award for career achievement, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
The new award honours annually the career achievement of an international author for an outstanding body of non-fiction work. The Weston International Award joins the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, now in its 13th year and also valued at $75,000 (£59,000).
Both are supported by the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation through a multi-year funding commitment to elevate and embolden nonfiction writers both in Canada and abroad.
Robert Macfarlane writes about humans, landscapes and the living world. He has published six non-fiction books over the past 20 years, from Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Granta, 2003) to Underland: A Deep Time Journey (Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
His books – which also include The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015) and The Gifts of Reading (2016) – have been translated into 30 languages, won numerous prizes, and been widely adapted for music, film, television, radio and theatre.
Macfarlane has also written films including “River” (2022) and “Mountain” (2017), both narrated by Willem Dafoe, and collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Johnny Flynn.
He is a fellow of Emmanuel College and a professor of literature and environmental humanities at the University of Cambridge. In 2017 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E M Forster Prize for Literature. His current book project, forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton in 2025, is entitled Is a River Alive?, and “is about the lives and deaths of rivers, the global Rights of Nature movement, and the new-old idea that the world is far more alive than is allowed".
An event celebrating the win, "The Weston International Award Presents: An Evening with Robert Macfarlane", will be held at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on 18th September. At the event, Macfarlane will give a short talk and then engage in an on-stage conversation with a Canadian peer about his career and work.
The international advisory committee was composed of broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and authors Pico Iyer and Sam Tanenhaus.
The Canadian jury comprised journalist and author Kamal Al-Solaylee, economist and author Denise Chong, Wayne Grady, professor of non-fiction at the University of British Columbia, and authors Charlotte Gray and Kate Harris.
The jury said Macfarlane writes “in prose as clear and flowing as a mountain stream", adding: “He draws on history, science, mythology, biography and his own travels to interrogate the forces shaping human relationships to place.”
To be eligible for the award, an author must have published at least three books of outstanding literary merit in the genre of nonfiction that are written in English or widely available in translation.
