Robert Macfarlane Meets Elif Shafak – Rivers of Life | How To Academy

Fri, 12 September 2025

7:30 pm - 8:45 pm BST

Robert Macfarlane Meets Elif Shafak – Rivers of Life

Live In Conversation In London

Join Robert Macfarlane and Elif Shafak for a deeply personal and provocative journey inviting us to reimagine the nature of rivers, stories, and life itself.

‘Water remembers. It is humans who forget.’

Renowned not only in her native Turkey and her adopted home of Britain but also across the globe, Elif Shafak is an author whose novels succeed where so many others fail: at once enchanting the spirit and the senses, stirring the heart, and making us think deeply about the great themes of human life.

Our greatest living nature writer, Robert Macfarlane is both the author of prize-winning bestsellers including Underland, Landmarks, and The Old Ways, and an artistic polymath whose collaborators include many of the most distinguished artists, musicians, and poets of our time.

Now Elif and Robert come together for a one-of-a-kind meeting to explore the magic and mystery of rivers – from the dirt-black Thames of Victorian London to the wounded lagoons of Southern India.

Elif’s new novel There Are Rivers in the Sky tells a story spanning centuries and continents entwined by rivers, rains, and waterdrops. Robert’s new book Is a River Alive? reveals a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings – who should be recognised as such in both imagination and law.

Don’t miss this extraordinary and unique conversation between two of our greatest living writers. This is a magical and radical night that will make you rethink what you think you know about rivers and about the nature of life.

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Elif Shafak

Award-Winning British Turkish Novelist

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist whose work has been translated into fifty-five languages. The author of nineteen books, twelve of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s novel, The Island of Missing Trees, was a top ten Sunday Times bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Her previous novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize; longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as Blackwell’s Book of the Year. Her novel The Forty Rules of Love was chosen by the BBC as one of the 100 books that shaped our century. Shafak was awarded the Halldór Laxness International Literature Prize for her contribution to ‘the renewal of the art of storytelling.’

Robert Macfarlane

Award-Winning Nature Writer

Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include 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. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. 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. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is currently completing his third book with Jackie Morris: The Lost Birds.