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Robert Macfarlane | Podcast

Robert Macfarlane & Rachael Allen

‘When you're dealing with a geological context, its age exceeds your knowing, exceeds your comprehension. Deep time is dizzying and vertiginous.’


In episode 80 of the Granta podcast, Rachael Allen speaks to travel writer Robert Macfarlane. Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and most recently, The Old Ways. Macfarlane talks about ‘Underland’, his essay in Granta 124: Travel, which sees him exploring the underground caves of Karst country. He also discusses the different approaches writers use to show landscape through language.

‘When you’re dealing with a geological context, its age exceeds your knowing, exceeds your comprehension. Deep time is dizzying and vertiginous.’

 


 

Image © BBC Two

In Conversation
The Online Edition
9th August 2013
In Conversation
The Online Edition
9th August 2013

Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane was born in Nottinghamshire in 1976. He is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award and the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Non-fiction Award. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times.

More about the author →

Rachael Allen

Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland (2019) and God Complex (2024). She was the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award and an Eric Gregory Award. She was born in Cornwall and works as an editor and lecturer in London.

More about the author →

More on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | Issue 138

Robert Macfarlane | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Robert Macfarlane

‘The best writers rose to the challenge by seeking not originality of destination, but originality of form.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 133

Fragments

Roger Deakin & Robert Macfarlane

‘Entering a wood is to enter an element as different as the sea.’

In Conversation | The Online Edition

In Conversation

Robert Macfarlane & Adam Scovell

‘Travelling into the Ness for the first time was exactly like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker’

Robert Macfarlane in conversation with Adam Scovell.

Essays & Memoir | Issue 124 padlock

Underland

Robert Macfarlane

‘There are many ways to die underground.’

Essays & Memoir | Issue 119

Silt

Robert Macfarlane

‘This is the Broomway, allegedly ‘the deadliest’ path in Britain and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked.’

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Black and Female

Tsitsi Dangarembga

‘By the time I was in my teens, I had taken up an existence framed by a double negative: not male, not white.’

An excerpt from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s essay collection, Black and Female.

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