The Lost Spells

The poems are beautiful, insightful and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny; and together with the vivid artwork, wild creatures are brought to life. A beautiful volume sure to be treasured by nature lovers of all ages. * i *The most beautiful and thought-provoking book I’ve read this year * Observer on ‘The Lost Words’ *Gorgeous to look at and to read. Give it to a child to bring back the magic and scope of language * Guardian on ‘The Lost Words’ *A breathtaking book. Jackie Morris has created something that you could spend all day looking at… Accessible and magical * New Statesman on ‘The Lost Words’ *Gilded and glorious, one of the year’s loveliest books for all ages over 10 * The Sunday Times on ‘The Lost Words’ *

Robert Macfarlane’s Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe.

Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Macfarlane and Morris’s latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026.