Robert Macfarlane: Is a River Alive?

Join us for the official U.S. launch of the acclaimed new book from Robert Macfarlane, one of our era’s most renowned writers of nature, people, and place.

Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. It is also an account on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places. Macfarlane forges his path from the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a waterway that flows through his own years and days. Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? reminds us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.

Macfarlane will be in conversation with PW's Director of Publishing, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Attendees have the option to receive a signed copy of Is a River Alive? when purchasing a ticket. Copies of Is a River Alive? will also be available at the event.

Robert Macfarlane’s best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind; they have been translated into more than 30 languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally best-selling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Pioneer Works Broadcast. A geographer and writer, he teaches at NYU and writes for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among many other publications. His books include Island People, Names of New York, and, with Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.

This program is part of PW Broadcast's Author Talks, a series highlighting authors and thinkers across disciplines.

Pioneer Works Broadcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, bridging the two cultures of science and the arts.