Watership Down

Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in southern England, around Hampshire, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home (the hill of Watership Down), encountering perils and temptations along the way.

Watership Down was Richard Adams’ debut novel. It was rejected by several publishers before Collings accepted the manuscript;[4] the published book then won the annual Carnegie Medal (UK), annual Guardian Prize (UK), and other book awards. The novel was adapted into an animated feature film in 1978 and, from 1999 to 2001, an animated children’s television series.[5][6] In 2018, a drama of the story was made, which both aired in the UK and was made available on Netflix.

Adams completed a sequel almost 25 years later, in 1996, Tales from Watership Down,[a] constructed as a collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren.[7][8][9]

The story began as tales that Richard Adams told his young daughters Juliet and Rosamund during long car journeys. He recounted in 2007 that he “began telling the story of the rabbits … improvised off the top of [his] head, as [they] were driving along”.[6][11] The daughters insisted he write it down—”they were very, very persistent”. After some delay he began writing in the evenings and completed it 18 months later.[11] The book is dedicated to the two girls.[12]

Adams’s descriptions of wild rabbit behaviour were based on The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964), by British naturalist Ronald Lockley.[13][14] The two later became friends, embarking on an Antarctic tour that became the subject of a co-authored book, Voyage Through the Antarctic (A. Lane, 1982).[13]

Watership Down was rejected seven times before it was accepted by Rex Collings.[15] The one-man London publisher Collings wrote to an associate, “I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad?” The associate did call it “a mad risk,” in her obituary of Collings, to accept “a book as bizarre by an unknown writer which had been turned down by the major London publishers; but,” she continued, “it was also dazzlingly brave and intuitive.”[16] Collings had little capital and could not pay an advance but “he got a review copy onto every desk in London that mattered.”[11] Adams wrote that it was Collings who gave Watership Down its title.[17] There was a second edition in 1973.

Macmillan USA, then a media giant, published the first U.S. edition in 1974 and a Dutch edition was also published that year by Het Spectrum.[3][18] According to WorldCat, participating libraries hold copies in 18 languages of translation.[19]