The book won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Festival, North America's equivalent of the Boardman Tasker Prize.

The Wild Places was published in September 2007, and describes a series of journeys made in search of the wildness that remains in Britain and Ireland. The Irish Times described the book as 'a new kind of exploration writing, perhaps even the birth of a new genre, which demands a new category of its own.' The book asks why people, including Macfarlane, are drawn to mountains despite their obvious dangers, and examines the powerful and sometimes fatal hold that mountains can come to have over the imagination. It is an account of the development of Western attitudes to mountains and precipitous landscapes, and takes its title from a line by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Macfarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was published in 2003 and won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

He is married to Julia Lovell, and has three children. His brother James is also a consultant physician in respiratory medicine. His father John Macfarlane is a respiratory physician who co-authored the CURB-65 score of pneumonia in 2003. He began a PhD at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2000, and in 2001 was elected a Fellow of the college. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford. Macfarlane was born in Halam, Nottinghamshire, and attended Nottingham High School. In 2022, he was mentioned as an unlikely contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is married to professor of modern Chinese history and literature Julia Lovell. Forster Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, which include The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words (2017) and Underland (2019). Robert Macfarlane (born 15 August 1976) is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Lily Iona Macfarlane, Thomas Edward Macfarlane, William Alexander Macfarlane Mountains of the Mind The Wild Places The Old Ways Landmarks The Lost Words Underland Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford.

The old ways a journey on foot