Is A River Alive? A conversation with Robert Macfarlane
We are thrilled to welcome acclaimed author and professor Robert Macfarlane to the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, who will be talking at KTH on March 12 about his newest book “Is a River Alive?”, in a conversation with Pella Thiel, moderated by Ingrid Rieser.
“Is a River Alive?”
was published in May 2025. It is considered one of Macfarlane’s most personal, poetic and political books and was received with great acclaim, becoming number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list in May 2025. In March 2026 Macfarlane will visit Stockholm when “Har floden ett liv?”, the Swedish translation, will be published by
Ocean Books.
In this book Macfarlane explores how people have thought and felt about rivers throughout history, while weaving a story that moves between past, present and future. Can nature have a soul? What are whispering trees, mighty mountains and singing rivers trying to tell us?
Around the world, rivers are dying. But at the same time, a powerful global movement is underway to recognize the lives and rights of rivers, and to rekindle our relationships with these vast, enigmatic life forms whose landscapes we share. The movement for the rights of nature has ignited the commitment of activists, artists, legislators and politicians around the world, especially around waterways.
At KTH on the evening of March 12 Robert Macfarlane will discuss the book and welcome us into this transformative thought: that rivers are, in fact, living beings and should be recognized as such – both emotionally and legally. Pella Thiel, rights of nature activist and author of the book Naturlagen, will join him in a conversation on the aliveness of rivers and their multifaceted meanings. This discussion will be moderated by Ingrid M. Rieser, host of the podcast Forest of Thought.
At the event there will be an opportunity to buy a copy of “Har floden ett liv?” (the Swedish version of “Is a River Alive?”) and get it signed by Robert Macfarlane.
Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His books include
Underland, Landmarks,The Old Ways,The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. 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 and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, 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. As a lyricist, he has written songs and albums with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Hayden Thorpe and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Woodand The Moon Also Rises. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. Robert Macfarlane is a Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English in Cambridge and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Ingrid M. Rieser is the host of the
Forest of Thought
, a podcast that explores how we might live well in relation to each other and the more-than-human world. Growing up among rivers and mountains in Norway, she’s interested in how we open up possibilities for different modes of thinking and being in the world. She works creatively through film and non-fiction writing, and helps people communicate the issues they care about through illustration, animation, and podcasts.
