Richard George Adams is best-remembered as the author of Watership Down, but wrote many other novels, short stories, poems and a biography. He originally began telling the story of Watership Down to his two daughters, Juliet and Rosamond, on a trip to Stratford-on-Avon, to see a play. They insisted he publish the tale as a book. When Watership Down was finally published, it sold over a million copies in record time in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Watership Down has become a modern classic and won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 1972.
Others of his books include Shardik, Maia, Tales from Watership Down, The Girl in a Swing and The Plague Dogs, the last two of which, together with Watership Down, have been filmed. His goal was always to tell a good story, ideally one so good you can’t put it down! His last work, ‘The Adventures of Eggbox Dragon’, which is a picture-book for younger children, will be published posthumously by Hodder in 2017. It was written when he was 93.
During his later years Richard and his wife Elizabeth lived in Whitchurch, Hampshire, very close to Watership Down, and not far from where they had both grown up. He wrote about his childhood and youth, including the time he served in the army in World War II, in his biography ‘The Day Gone By’.
