Wordfest presents Robert Macfarlane

Wordfest presents Robert Macfarlane

Hosted by Kevin Van Tighem

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This is the show Wordfest has been waiting all year to announce. Join us for an exclusive opportunity to see British writer, naturalist, and Nobel Prize contender Robert Macfarlane. He's coming to Calgary as part of his North American tour to celebrate Is a River Alive?, which is not just Macfarlane's latest literary masterpiece, but a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. A clarion call to re-centre rivers in our stories, law and politics, it invites us to radically re-imagine not only rivers but life itself.

At the heart of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has. No one understands that better than Albertans, and we are thrilled to have Canadian writer and naturalist Kevin Van Tighem hosting the conversation, which will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing fuelled by Shelf Life books. You can  pre-order your copy of Is a River Alive?, as well as Macfarlane’s extensive back list (which includes the international publishing phenomenon The Lost Words), here.  

“I’ve poured all I have into it. My notebooks were always thirsty; I filled over 20 of them while on fieldwork," Macfarlane says of his new book. "It’s become the most political, personal & (possibly) poetic book I’ve written.” 

You won’t want to miss this incredible evening, and we are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible.

About Is a River Alive?

"A river of poetic prose... Read it for pleasure, read it for illumination, read it for confirmation that our world is changing in wonderful as well as terrible ways." —Rebecca Solent

At the heart of Is a River Alive? 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. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of the ancient, urgent concept.

Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognize the lives and the rights of rivers, and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. The young "rights of nature" movement has lit up activists, artists, law-makers and politicians across six continents—and become the focus for revolutionary thinking about rivers in particular.

The book flows like water, from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by Canadian goldmining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to northeastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river—the Mutehekau or Magpie—is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader called Rita Mestokosho.

Is A River Alive? is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. A clarion call to re-centre rivers in our stories, law and politics, it invites us to radically re-imagine not only rivers but life itself. At the heart of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.

About Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane is the bestselling author of an award-winning trilogy of books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, and The Old Ways. He is also the author of Landmarks and Holloway. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and is published in more than 20 countries, and his books have been widely adapted for TV, film, and radio by the BBC, among others. Macfarlane has contributed to Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012, and is currently a Fellow in English of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

In 2023, Macfarlane was awarded the Writers' Trust inaugural Westin International Award. Said the jury, ""Macfarlane's words evoke a panoply of emotions — from awe and wonder to exultation and trepidation, as we walk alongside him—gently drawing us into new ways of seeing and imagining. The result is a body of immersive nonfiction that proves the world is more complicated and mysterious, more fraught and beautiful, the longer we look at it." 

About Host Kevin Van Tighem    

Kevin Van Tighem has worked in landscape ecology and conservation for four decades. Since retiring from a decades-long career in Canada’s national parks that culminated in his service as Superintendent of Banff National Park, he has served on the boards of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and the Livingstone Landowners Group, and been active in support of numerous conservation causes. Van Tighem is the award-winning author of fifteen books on wildlife and nature; his next book, Understory, will be released in fall 2025. In 2021 Van Tighem received the Wildlife Federation’s Robert Bateman Award for advancing wildlife conservation through the arts, He has also been honoured by the Kainai Environmental Protection Society with a Blackfoot name, Ihtssakwi k’a’taa, that translates to Rough Rapid Water.

Be Curiouser

• Listen: Is a River Alive? (Podcast) –BBC Radio
• Profile: Robert Macfarlane and the Dark Side of Nature Writing. -New York Times
• Review: Is a River Alive? -Los Angeles Times
• Review: Streams of Consciousness. -The Guardian
• I’ve spent my career writing ‘non-fiction.’ Here’s what it represents to me. -The Globe and Mail
• Robert Macfarlane: ‘Are we being good ancestors?“ Mostly no.’ -The Guardian