ROBERT MACFARLANE is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the author of a number of bestselling and prize-winning books, including The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Holloway, Landmarks, and Underland, which won the Wainwright Prize. His work has been translated into many languages and widely adapted for film, television, and radio. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E. M. Forster Award for Literature in 2017. He is a word collector and mountain climber -- and he has three children who have taught him more about the world than any book. TheFolk by the Oak festival team, proud commissioners of Spell Songs, were thrilled with the release of this wonderfully inventive, dazzlingly beautiful bookand the opportunity to create new music with the Spell Songs Ensemble! The relationship between naming, knowing and nature has long interested Macfarlane. The Lost Words grew out of research for his book Landmarks (2015), which examined the work of a dozen British and American writers of place, and gathered and organised over 2,000 terms for nature, landscape, creatures and weather from more than 30 languages, dialects and sub-dialects of Britain and Ireland. The book ended with a chapter called ‘Childish’, about the relationship of childhood and nature.

Luminously beautiful. An amulet in dark times, to be carried like a talisman out into the world, where it is very much needed' Dara McAnulty Online culture has boomed, screen time has soared and the ‘roaming range’ within which children can play and stray unsupervised has shrunk by more than 90% in 40 years amid parental fears about traffic, ‘stranger danger’ and the pressure of school work.” The spells are even better and I love the fact that it says explicitly ‘this is a book of spells to be spoken aloud’. Everything about it is absolutely beautiful and we will be getting behind it in a big way,” he said. There is beautiful puppetry designed by Amber Donovan Kahn and lovely visual abstractions in Hannah Sibai’s set including artfully fluttering ocean waves and a giant luminous globe which looks like an oversized pop-up of Morris’s illustration in the book.Puffin started out as a non-fiction publisher, with its first title appearing in 1940. As the most iconic and well-known children’s book brand in the UK today, we are always on the lookout for innovative ways to tell the world’s favourite stories and for brilliant new debut talent and brands that connect with today’s young readers, from newborn up to twelve years old. The Lost Spells is a celebration of the natural; it is a collection of prose poetry about foxes and trees and birds and rabbits and flowers: it is an elegy to what we are losing and what we must try to retain. Only a year after publication, the book had won two literary prizes and been translated into several languages.

Asked whether there was an environmental message in The Lost Spells, Morris said: “It’s a celebration of the nearby wild. If there is a message there, it is simply wonder and awe at the beautiful complexity of the non-human. And respect, for the wisdom of trees, the shape of a bird, the wild of the fox.”A proportion of proceeds from each copy of The Lost Words is being given to one such organisation, Action for Conservation.

To wish for the restoration of this ‘positive connection’ is not to lament a “lost golden age”, says Macfarlane, or to favour nature to the exclusion of technology, “rather it is to engage with much broader inequalities within society, and to seek to increase both what is good for nature and what is good for children.”I loved this book; it’s a book I will revisit and a book I will encourage others to read because despite increasing decline and modernisation, the natural world is still on our doorstep: she is still there if we are willing to look and to appreciate her. Lets make an effort to understand her magic and (better yet) keep it alive. And as if the book couldn't get any better, it is filled with the most stunning watercolor illustrations of all the beautiful wildlife Robert Macfarlane is writing about! As some of you may know, I'm an illustrator myself, and one of my favorite things to illustrate is wildlife, nature and landscapes. As with The Lost Words, the publishers of The Lost Spells have commissioned Eva John to create an 'Explorers' Guides', but this time the guide has been designed to follow the seasons, and updatededitions will be made available as the year progresses. The book has taken on a 'wild life' of its own with the sparks of inspiration taking it in numerous creative directions.