Guardian first book award 2003
Mountain man wins Guardian book prize
Robert Macfarlane last night earned a distinction which not every author would envy. He became the first award-winning writer so immersed in his topic that he is able to chronicle - from experience - the early stages of frostbite.
On top of the world
Robert Macfarlane's fascinating personal account of the appeal and terrors of high-altitude climbing won him the Guardian First Book award last night. He tells Oliver Burkeman how he fell in love with the mountains.
I sought risk out. I courted it. In fact, I paid for it...
In an extract from his book Mountains of the Mind Robert Macfarlane recalls being caught in a rockfall in the Alps.
Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane (part 2)
Over the course of three centuries, therefore, a tremendous revolution of perception occurred in the West concerning mountains. The qualities for which mountains were once reviled - steepness, desolation, perilousness - came to be numbered among their most prized aspects.
Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
'What makes mountain-going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands of some of its participants that they die...' Robert Macfarlane's cultural history of our love affair with mountains, Mountains of the Mind, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award. Read an extract
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First chapters
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Peak practice
In the West, mountains were just mountains until the Romantics became inspired by them. Robert Macfarlane charts the history of a cultural transformation in Mountains of the Mind