Rob Cowen is an award-winning writer, hailed as one of the UK’s most original voices on nature, place and people. His first book, Skimming Stones, won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors. His second book, Common Ground (PRH; 2015) was shortlisted for the Portico, Richard Jefferies Society and Wainwright Prizes and voted one of the nation’s favourite nature books of all time in a BBC poll. His follow-up, The Heeding (E&T; 2021), was the best-selling debut book of poetry in 2021. His latest book, The North Road (PRH; 2025) is released in April, 2025. Rob was previously a journalist writing on nature and travel and he has contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent and written radio programmes for the BBC. He lives in North Yorkshire.
-BOOKS-
THE NORTH ROAD
“Five stars. This is an astonishing book in its scope and vitality. It’s one to relish and revisit.”
The Telegraph
“Brilliant. A remarkable, post-Covid, post-Brexit state of the nation literary archaeology.”
Financial Times
“A beautifully written book, often giving the purely visual pleasure of a road movie. Lyrical…entrancing.”
The Observer (Book of the Week)
“The North Road is a wonderful achievement…. Cowen has perhaps found his country’s elusive sense of identity. It resides not in landscape or football or a National Trust garden, but in an ever-changing, ever-active, thundering dual carriageway. It begins in uncertainty and ends in a different nation. Brilliantly, The North Road is everything. It is “England and nowhere”.’
Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman
“Haunted and haunting: Cowen tracks the London-Edinburgh highway in a mesmerising exploration of time, place, memory and identity. A dazzlingly inventive work of literature.“
Robert Macfarlane
“Stunning and utterly unique. The North Road sits in a genre of one. He’s a magician whose brilliance lies not in trickery, but in real talent and a wild, untamed imagination that’s capable of transcending time.”
Benjamin Myers
“A true epic of the road, tapping the spine of a country and its submerged culture. Hard miles experienced, endured, transformed.”
Iain Sinclair
“Rob Cowen brings a highway to living sentient life, from nowhere to everywhere in this elegant, moving mind-map of a storied road.”
Philip Hoare
“Masterful. It’s one of the best best things I’ve read in a long time…”
John Mitchinson
“When I began this book, I wondered if it would be for me. I didn’t think I was interested in roads, but then I couldn’t put it down. The North Road is a wonderful, epic braiding of history and geography and personal memoir. Few writers would have dared to weave these threads together, even fewer have the deep knowledge and writing talent to make something this deep and poetic.”
James Rebanks
“A road, like a story, is never just that. Both have roots, tributaries, ancestors and consequences. From first step to surprise destination, The North Road is as layered and braided as the route it follows, and as brutal, beautiful and unique as a life. With his singular blend of research, personal exploration and intensely visceral storytelling, Rob Cowen is truly in a class of his own.“
Amy-Jane Beer
“Rob Cowen is an enchanter, and he has conjured up a classic with this extraordinary, multi-layered knockout of a book. The North Road asks all the big questions – identity, history, memory, belonging – and offers riffs and responses that are both personal and universal, never glib, always beguiling.”
Sharon Blackie
“Epic, magisterial, hard-won, properly-wrought – much like the Great North Road itself. Truly, a tour de force…you may read another book in 2025, you will not read a better one.”
John Lewis-Stempel
“This thought-provoking and beautiful exploration of that most humanised of spaces, the road, shows how our lives are always intimately bound to those of others within the social landscape. Through sharing and celebrating this common journey, Cowen manages to demonstrate the wonder of what it is to be alive. This is a book that will have your heart ringing like a bell.“
Matt Gaw
“A dazzling, dogged, layered account of one road’s passage through place, time and an ordinary family’s history, The North Road is truly a trip.”
Melissa Harrison
“A deep and richly satisfying, mind bending exploration of space, place and memory. I loved the many, many colourful layers of The North Road.”
Clover Stroud
“A journey on foot that fragments, startlingly, into history, fiction, philosophical enquiry and fearless memoir. A beautifully woven, mesmerising book.“
Tom Bullough
“A masterful weaving of time and place. The North Road offers a rare, strong blend of national and personal – sweeping, sensitive and enduring.”
Tristan Gooley
“Rob Cowen weighs up the mighty A1 from the hard-packed solum beneath its pitch to the aerial maps by which so many steer its course. A deep time hymn to a mercurial trunk route that’s beckoned, blistered and borne travellers for centuries unknown, The North Road is by turns brilliant, questing and poignant. Equal parts ardent asphalt anthem and song to belonging, Cowen’s new book is a north/south tour de force.”
Dan Richards
“In revealing buried pasts, glancing the uncanny, and exhuming the strata of both personal and national identity, Cowen explores the question of our final destination: ‘What will remain?’ Reading this is a revelation.“
Jade Angeles Fitton
“This book will have you tripping on England. Rob Cowen has made the great portrait of the A1, ‘the main road’ par excellence. His text is a glimmering cocktail of memory and diachronic history, a plait of three enchanted cords – the ancient highway itself, the life of the land, and Cowen’s personal story. It feels like Cowen has somehow resurrected each inspired, vile or crazy moment that has ever happened within mindsight of Britain’s greatest street and the nodes of its nearby places, from the burial mounds to the suburbs, the haunted battlefields to the beery coaching inns; the scratching quills of the poets to the gasps of those steamrolled by the infernal roads of industry. As Cowen – in his own voice, and the voices of the long-dead – chips the crust of banality off the old carriageway, we discover that this is the road off which Baldock was named after Baghdad; off which Cromwell tilled the earth before watering it with its own blood: the long portal of the highwaymen, hangmen and the MPVs of commuters and screaming kids. Cowen is the mystic interpreter of the Great North Road, its mapper-druid-advocate. “The road wanted to live”, he declares, and he has made it more alive.”
Damian Le Bas
“This wildly original journey tracing lost timelines of place, family, secrets and history held me in its beautiful, powerful spell from beginning to moving end. A great and important new work.”
Nick Drake
“Utterly took my breath away. Braiding cinematic narrative nonfiction with riveting and sometimes bloody historic fiction, this genre-bending book is both lyrical and gritty, blending fiction and non-fiction. It is certain to make a significant contribution to the best of travel writing. Not only is the iconic North Road the dynamic spine of the book, but like the best of travel writing about roads (including On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon), it signifies literal and metaphorical journeys: of personal evolution, the movement through time, freedom and escape, the unpredictability of life, breaking societal constraints, and connecting people, places, and ideas. Deeply researched and exquisitely poetic, The North Road is bound together by a compelling personal narrative as Cowen walks the North Road and listens to the kaleidoscopic historical tales it has to tell from pre-Roman to the present. It is such great writing that you begin to feel that you are walking through history and that the road is alive — a character who has witnessed great swathes of change and transformation over time. Indeed, the road helps transform the author and will the reader, too. It is a road worth travelling.”
Kathryn Aalto
“Cowen’s journey made The North Road feel universal; many will get a similar resonance from it as I did. Rob has given the A1 an entirely new sense of life.“
Luke Turner
“A beautifully textured road trip through past and present, in which dream and clear-eyed vision interlace to uncover the ways we make sense of our journeying.”
Wyl Menmuir
“Full of unexpected diversions and detours – just like the great road itself – Rob Cowen’s The North Road takes us on a fascinating, multi-layered journey through history, place, and personal story. Brilliantly researched, beautifully written, profound, and utterly unique. I loved it.”
Brigit Strawbridge
“An extraordinary, beautifully realised road trip, like nothing else I’ve read. Here, a road is a tributaried river, created and recreated by ourselves, our ghosts, doubles and echoes, and told as the story of us in the connections and coincidences a road [a ‘lungo drom’] engenders. In Rob’s hands, this poetic, poignant and lyrically political book, throws up more mysteries than it answers, as the best literature does – and leaves us wanting more.”
Nicola Chester
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THE HEEDING
Longlisted – Wainwright Prize 2022
Shortlisted – Richard Jefferies Society Prize 2021
Shortlisted – Books Are My Bag Award 2021
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COMMON GROUND
Top 3 – Britain’s Favourite Nature Book (BBC) 2018
Shortlisted – Wainwright Prize 2016
Shortlisted – Richard Jefferies Society Prize 2015
Shortlisted – Portico Prize for Literature 2015
‘Book Of The Year’ in the Times, the Independent and The Sunday Express
Top Ten Readers’ Choice 2015 – the Guardian
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SKIMMING STONES
Awarded – Society of Authors Roger Deakin Prize 2012
Rob Cowen 