The Lost Words

A timeless, beautifully designed gift for children and adults alike, The Lost Words is a gift that will be pored over and cherished for years to come. All over the country, there are words disappearing from children's lives. These are the words of the natural world; Dandelion, Otter, Bramble and Acorn, all gone. A wild landscape of imagination and play is rapidly fading from our children's minds. The Lost Words stands against the disappearance of wild childhood. It is a joyful celebration - in art and word - of nearby nature and its wonders. With acrostic spell-poems by award-winning writer Robert Macfarlane and illustrations by Jackie Morris, this enchanting book evokes the irreplaceable magic of language and nature for all ages. * Discover The Lost Spells, the magical companion book from the creators of a literary phenomenon. * Praise for The Lost Words: 'The most beautiful and thought-provoking book I've read this year' Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Observer 'Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris have made a thing of astonishing beauty' Alex Preston, Observer 'My top book of the year' Susan Hill, Spectator 'Gorgeous to look at and to read. Give it to a child to bring back the magic of language - and its scope' Jeanette Winterson, Guardian

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.