This week I attended the Wainwright Awards - the UK’s foremost nature and conservation writing awards - at a special ceremony held at the Elmley Nature Reserve in Kent, hosted by Wainwright Prize ambassador and The Times journalist Henry Bird.
The Adventures of Portly the Otter was shortlisted in the Children’s Fiction category which was an honour in it’s self. We didn’t win. A fabulous sounding Young Adult novel by Caryll Lewis called The Danger of Small Things was the winner, but I was utterly delighted when little Portly was awarded HIGHLY COMMENDED.
Portly is for such a different reader than a young adult novel that it seems odd to judge them against one another. The judges were very kind and said of their decision to make the extra award for Portly: “The author’s love for the natural world shines through on every page of this endlessly charming story. Evocative, gentle and full of warmth and humour, the judges felt it beautifully captures the spirit of Grahame’s original while bringing it to life for a modern audience.”
Portly the Otter is awarded Highly Commended by the Wainwright Prize
Jackie Morris & Robert Macfarlane’s The Book of Birds was awarded the 2026 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year, with Thomas Halliday and Gavin Scott winning the 2026 Children’s Wainwright Prize Book of the Year for their book Otherlands: An Illustrated Journey Through Earth’s Lost Worlds.