Robert Macfarlane Awarded 2025 Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing
Robert Macfarlane is an internationally renowned, award-winning author of numerous best-selling books, including The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind. The Thoreau Society awarded Macfarlane the 2025 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing in recognition of his profound contributions to literature that explores the relationships between people, place, and the natural world.
Macfarlane’s works, translated into more than thirty languages and adapted across media, have garnered global acclaim and honors, including the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Speaking at the Thoreau Prize award ceremony at TriCon Church on June 7, Macfarlane explored our connection to and participation in the natural world, acknowledging that “rivers run through people as surely as they run through places. They irrigate our bodies, our stories, our songs, our memories, our conversation.”
Macfarlane’s newest book, Is a River Alive?, called by The Guardian “one of the big publishing events (if not the biggest) of 2025,” takes readers to threatened river systems on three continents: the cloud forests of Ecuador, the creeks and lagoons of southern India, and the Mutehekauor Magpie River of northeastern Quebec. At 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.
Underlying Macfarlane’s book and philosophy is the idea that environmental justice is not just about humans respecting the earth, but reframing our sense of being part of it. “We here are all part of the water system,” he reminded the Thoreau prize ceremony audience, “We are all water bodies, flowed in and on. When we run we are rivers, when we are seated we are ponds. I speak here to a room full of Waldens.”
The Thoreau Prize, established in 2010 by nature writer Dale Peterson and administered by the Thoreau Society since 2020, is awarded annually to a writer who, like Henry David Thoreau, speaks for nature with insight, eloquence, and ethical depth.
PHOTO CAPTION: Members of the Thoreau Prize Committee, past and present, with the Honoree. (Left to right) Megan Mayhew-Bergman, Rochelle Johnson, John Kucich, Robert Macfarlane, Anna West Winter, Dale Peterson, and Alexis Rizzuto.