Richard Adams

Born Richard George Adams on May 10, 1920, in Newbury, Berkshire, the son of a country doctor and a homemaker mother, he grew up walking the chalk downs of the Hampshire countryside that would later furnish his most famous landscapes. He attended Horris Hill and then Bradfield College before going up to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1938 to read Modern History. In July 1940 he was called up to the British Army, commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps, and posted with the Airborne Company as a brigade liaison officer, seeing service in Palestine, Europe, and East Asia without ever firing his rifle in anger. He returned to Worcester after the war, took his bachelor's in 1948, and joined the British Civil Service, eventually rising to Assistant Secretary at the Department of the Environment. The story that became Watership Down began as a long improvised tale told to his two daughters on a car journey to Stratford; they insisted he write it down, and after rejections from four publishers and three agencies, Rex Collings accepted the manuscript in 1972. The novel won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and sold over a million copies within a few years. He left the civil service in 1974 to write full-time. Shardik (1974), The Plague Dogs (1977), and Maia (1984) followed. He served two years as president of the RSPCA before resigning in 1982 over what he called the Society's preoccupation with itself rather than the animals. He died on December 24, 2016, at the age of ninety-six, in Oxford, ten miles from the Whitchurch village beneath the down he had named for life.

On the road to Stratford-upon-Avon, eight-year-old Juliet demanded a story he had never told before, without any delay. Adams began improvising off the top of his head: 'Once upon a time there were two rabbits, called Hazel and Fiver, and I'm going to tell you about some of their adventures.' His daughters spent years insisting he write it down.