Rhodes College Will Host Free Public Lecture Titled “Is A River Alive?”
Macfarlane will also introduce a free screening of his documentary Underland at Blount Auditorium.
The Spence L. Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College will host a free public lecture titled “Is a River Alive?” on Thursday, Oct. 1, by Dr. Robert Macfarlane, professor of literature and the environmental humanities in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.
Macfarlane is a well-known writer about nature, climate, landscape, people and place, and his award-winning books—which include Is a River Alive? (2025), Underland (2019), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012) and Mountains of the Mind (2003)—have been translated into more than 30 languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for music, film, television, radio and theater.
He has also written operas, plays, and films including River (2022) and Mountain (2017), 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 (2017), The Lost Spells (2020), and The Book of Birds (2026). As a lyricist, he has written songs and albums 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) and an EP, Six Signs (2022). In 2022, with the actor-director Simon McBurney he co-adapted Susan Cooper's classic fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising into a twelve-part BBC audio drama series.
Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College and of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Award for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto, he was awarded the inaugural Weston International Award for career achievement in non-fiction.
The Rhodes event begins at 6 p.m. in the McNeill Concert Hall (West Campus).
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