The Creative Partnership of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

The Creative Partnership of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

This article relates to The Book of Birds

Writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris have established themselves as leading names in the UK and beyond when it comes to writing about nature. Their work aims to foster reverence for the world around us and inspire us to defend it.

The seed of their first collaboration was planted when Oxford University Press removed several nature-based words from its junior dictionary, citing they were no longer in everyday use among children. Morris was contacted by poet Laurence Rose, who asked her to sign a letter requesting the words be reinstated. Concerned that the proposed erasure of words like "bluebell," "acorn," "kingfisher," and "heron" could lead to a lack of appreciation for the natural world, Morris wanted to do more than simply sign a letter. She conceived of a book of paintings accompanied by a dictionary definition—one for each of the words at risk of being culled.

Morris was a big fan of Macfarlane's book, The Wild Places, and reached out to request he write a foreword. Macfarlane initially declined due to prior work commitments, but found that he couldn't shake the idea. However, instead of writing a foreword, he wanted to write a series of poems to accompany Morris's art, which would aim to "cast spells of language to summon the words back into common usage," as Morris described it.

After agreeing the book should be aimed at all ages, not just children, as Macfarlane originally proposed, the pair put together a proposal and took it to publisher Hamish Hamilton, who immediately greenlit the project. This resulted in The Lost Words, released in 2017. The book became a huge success and cultural phenomenon, garnering multiple awards and inspiring more than 20 successful public crowdfunding campaigns to get the book into schools, hospices, and care homes across the UK.

A sister book, The Lost Spells, followed in 2020, and soon led to Spell Songs, a collective of seven musicians (originally eight) who create music directly inspired by the work of Macfarlane and Morris. In 2022, the ensemble performed in a sell-out tour, a highly collaborative project that involved Morris joining the musicians on stage to paint live as they played, while Macfarlane's words were read aloud to the audience.

The Book of Birds is the duo's fourth major project together, combining Morris's enchanting watercolors with hybrid prose-poem-essays written by Macfarlane, celebrating the majesty of the bird species at risk of being lost at the hand of humans. The Spell Songs collective has announced a new album, In Thin Air, that is inspired by the book.

As for the future, Morris has already hinted at "the seed of a new idea" between her and Macfarlane, which she hopes "will take root and grow."

Filed under Books and Authors

This article relates to The Book of Birds. It will run in the July 15, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.