Macfarlane's first book,
Mountains of the Mind, was published in 2003 and won the
Guardian First Book Award, the
Somerset Maugham Award, and the
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the
Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and the
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It is an account of the development of Western attitudes to mountains and precipitous landscapes, and takes its title from a line by the poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book asks why people, including Macfarlane, are drawn to mountains despite their obvious dangers, and examines the powerful and sometimes fatal hold that mountains can come to have over the imagination.
The Irish Times described the book as "a new kind of exploration writing, perhaps even the birth of a new genre, which demands a new category of its own."
Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature was published in March 2007. In the book, Macfarlane examines
originality and
plagiarism in
English literature between 1859 and 1900, and explores the changing understanding of originality and
self seen in
Romantic and
Victorian literature. He presents two theories of literary originality:
creatio, meaning creation 'from nothing', and
inventio, meaning creation based on "inventive reuse". Macfarlane argues that a key element of English literature during the nineteenth century was a gradual rejection of
creatio in favour of prioritising
inventio. The book includes discussion of the works of
Charles Dickens,
George Eliot,
Walter Pater,
Oscar Wilde,
Charles Reade,
Lionel Johnson and
George Henry Lewes.
Original Copy was positively received by both academic and journalistic reviewers. In a 2008 review, Meg Jensen described the book as arguing in favour of an "open and collaborative response of authors to works of the past." Jensen noted that this view diverged from that of Macfarlane's fellow
Pembroke College alumnus
Harold Bloom, whose 1973 book
The Anxiety of Influence interpreted "literary inheritance as a burden that must be concealed and negotiated".
The Wild Places was published in September 2007, and describes a series of journeys made in search of the wildness that remains in Britain and Ireland. The book won the
Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Festival, North America's equivalent of the Boardman Tasker Prize. It became a best-seller in Britain and
The Netherlands, and was shortlisted for six further prizes, including the
Dolman Best Travel Book Award, the
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and North America's
Orion Book Award, a prize founded "to recognize books that deepen our connection to the natural world, present new ideas about our relationship with nature, and achieve excellence in writing."
The Wild Places was adapted for television by the
BBC as an episode of the
BBC Two Natural World series broadcast in February 2010; the film later won a Wildscreen Award.
The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot, the third in the "loose trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart" begun by
Mountains of the Mind and
The Wild Places, was published in June 2012. The book describes the years Macfarlane spent following "old ways" (pilgrimage paths, sea-roads, prehistoric trackways, ancient rights of way) in southeast England, northwest Scotland, Spain, Sichuan and Palestine. Its guiding spirit is the early twentieth-century writer and poet,
Edward Thomas, and its chief subject is the reciprocal shaping of people and place.
The Old Ways was in the bestseller lists for six months. It was acclaimed as a "tour de force" by
William Dalrymple in
The Observer. It was chosen as
Book of the Year by
John Banville,
Philip Pullman,
Jan Morris,
John Gray,
Antony Beevor, and
Dan Stevens among others. In the UK, it was joint winner of the
Dolman Prize for Travel Writing, was shortlisted for the
Samuel Johnson Prize (the "non-fiction Booker"), the
Jan Michalski Prize for World Literature, the
Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction, the
Warwick Prize for Writing, the
Waterstones Book of the Year, and three other prizes. In the US, it was shortlisted for the
Orion Book Award.
Landmarks, a book that celebrates and defends the language of landscape, was published in the UK in March 2015. A version of its first chapter, published in
The Guardian as
The Word-Hoard, went viral, and the book became a Sunday Times number one bestseller. It was shortlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.
Landmarks is described on the cover as "a field guide to the literature of nature, and a vast glossary collecting thousands of the remarkable terms used in dozens of the languages and dialects of Britain and Ireland to describe and denote aspects of terrain, weather, and nature". Each of the book's chapters explores the landscapes and style of a writer or writers, as Macfarlane travels to meet farmers, sailors, walkers, glossarians, artists, poets and others who have developed intense and committing relationships with their chosen places. The chapter of the book concerning Nan Shepherd and the Cairngorm mountains was adapted for television by BBC4 and BBC Scotland. Macfarlane's detailed writing style, and his frequent references to dialect vocabulary, were satirised in a February 2016 edition of
Private Eye by
Craig Brown in the magazine's regular "Diary" feature.
Landmarks was published in the US in August 2016. It was described by Tom Shippey in
The Wall Street Journal as a book that "teaches us to love our world, even the parts of it that we have neglected. Mr Macfarlane is the great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation." In May 2016 Macfarlane published
The Gifts of Reading, a short book about gifts, stories and the unexpected consequences of generosity. All work for the book was given for free, and all moneys raised were donated to MOAS, the
Migrant Offshore Aid Station, to save refugee lives. With the artist
Jackie Morris, Macfarlane published
The Lost Words: A Spell Book in October 2017. The book became what the Guardian called 'a cultural phenomenon', winning Children's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards jointly with
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. The "lost" words of the book's title are twenty of the names for everyday nature—from "Acorn" through to "Wren" by way of "Bluebell", "Kingfisher", "Lark" and "Otter"—that were controversially dropped from inclusion in the Oxford Junior Dictionary due to under-use by children. half of England and a quarter of Wales. Funds were also raised to place a copy in every
hospice in Britain. The book is used by charities and carers working with
dementia sufferers, refugees, survivors of domestic abuse, childhood
cancer patients, and people in terminal care. It has been adapted for dance, outdoor theatre, choral music and classical music. In 2018 the new
Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at
Stanmore opened its new building with four levels decorated with art and poems from
The Lost Words. It was the inspiration for
Spell Songs, a folk music concert and album by musicians including Beth Porter,
Karine Polwart,
Julie Fowlis and
Kris Drever.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey was published in May 2019. It is a book about the deep-time pasts and futures of the Earth, as revealed by mythical underworlds and real subterranean journeys. The book was serialized on
BBC Radio 4 as the
Book of the Week for 29 April - 3 May 2019.
Is a River Alive?, published in May 2025, explores the relationships between rivers, human cultures, the environment, and the law. It incorporates themes of animism and the
Rights of Nature movement. The book also includes collaborations with artists, researchers, and activists such as
Cosmo Sheldrake and
Rita Mestokosho. ==Film==