Wainwright prize for nature writing awarded to memoir about elevating a hare throughout lockdown | Books

A memoir a few girl who rescued a hare throughout the pandemic has gained this 12 months’s Wainwright prize guide of the 12 months.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton follows the writer from London to the countryside, the place she sorted a leveret throughout lockdown.

Meanwhile, the Wainwright youngsters’s guide of the 12 months prize went to Lanisha Butterfield for Flower Block, illustrated by Hoang Giang. The story, which Butterfield describes as “a love letter to my working-class childhood”, is ready in a metropolis tower block, and finds a younger boy, Jeremiah, planting a packet of sunflower seeds in reminiscence of his father. The seeds sprout in a single day, taking on the house block.

The Wainwright prizes, named after the famed writer and fell walker Alfred Wainwright, have a good time nature and conservation writing. Each of the 2 most important prizes comes with a £2,500 award.

Dalton’s memoir, which was additionally shortlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction, is “a sustained and patient attempt to cross the species abyss, and to see the world through the hare’s eyes,” wrote Edward Posnett in a Guardian overview. “It possesses a dream-like quality, and often reads as a fable of metamorphosis.”

Both Dalton and Butterfield are debut authors. Butterfield’s Flower Block is “a beautifully told story brought to life by stunning artwork that kept me engaged from start to finish”, mentioned former Blue Peter presenter and choose Mwaka Mudenda. “I loved the rich diversity of characters throughout the book – a reminder of the beauty in our differences and the strength of community.”

Dalton and Butterfield have been named total winners out of six class winners, having gained the character writing class and the image books class respectively. Meanwhile the conservation writing prize was given to The Lie of the Land by Guy Shrubsole, the illustrative books prize was awarded to Feed the Planet by George Steinmetz with Joel Okay Bourne Jr and Michael Pollan, the kids’s fiction prize went to Wildlands by Brogen Murphy, and the kids’s nonfiction winner was Think Big: Secrets of Bees by Ben Hoare, illustrated by Nina Chakrabarti. Category winners have been awarded £500 every.

Along with Mudenda, the class judging chairs have been writer and bookshop proprietor Luke Sherlock, biologist and Natural History Museum podcast host Khalil Thirlaway, writer and ecologist Lee Schofield, evolutionary biologist and broadcaster Ella Al-Shamahi, and kids’s author Uju Asika.

The two total winners have been chosen by a panel which included the prize director, Alastair Giles, and topic specialists, drawing on suggestions from the class judging panels. “As environmental and social challenges grow ever more urgent, it’s inspiring to see writers of all ages and backgrounds using their voices to deepen our connection with the natural world,” mentioned Giles.

Last 12 months’s most important prizes have been gained by Michael Malay for Late Light and Foxlight by Katya Balen. Other previous winners embody James Rebanks, Merlin Sheldrake, Robert Macfarlane and Amy Liptrot.