Hamish Hamilton scoops 'powerful' book from Macfarlane on rights of natural world

Hamish Hamilton has scooped a “powerful” new book from Robert Macfarlane. 

Simon Prosser, publishing director, acquired British and Commonwealth rights to Is a River Alive? from Jessica Woollard at David Higham Associates, for publication in 2025. 

Macfarlane said the book focuses on a “counter-intuitive” idea that rivers, forests and mountains are living beings and they have rights which should be recognised both in imagination and in law.  

The book is structured as a triptych of journeys, heading to the cloud-forests of Ecuador, the wild rivers of Canada and the mountains and lagoons of India. It maps the places, people, histories and futures of the idea that the world is far more alive than we allow, and that nature itself has rights.   

Prosser said: “In his work so far, Robert Macfarlane has taken us from the mountains to the underworld, in books which defy easy categorisation, but embrace the widest of readerships. Stylistically interweaving intellectual and natural history, travel writing, reportage, nature-writing, ethics, politics and an innate ear for precise and evocative language which I would call poetry, his books create a space of their own. Based on what I have read so far, this new book will be not just a work of literary art, like Underland (Hamish Hamilton), but also a rallying-point and a catalyst for change. It will expand the ways that readers see and feel about the world, and invite us to radically re-imagine our understanding of ‘nature’ in culture and law. And it will be, as always, a deep joy to read.” 

Woollard added: “The idea at the heart of Robert’s next book is as old as our relationship with the rivers and the hills; but it has been forgotten. Its time has come round again, and we urgently need someone as intellectually rigorous and sharp as Robert Macfarlane to lay it out for us, someone who is also as lyrically creative and steeped in song and music, film and drama as he is at the moment.  I can’t wait to read him on the subject and I know that Hamish Hamilton will publish Is a River Alive? superbly."