Richard Adams

2 universes Last reviewed 2026-10-07

Richard Adams was born May 10, 1920, in Newbury, Berkshire, England, and died December 24, 2016, in Oxford at age ninety-six. He studied Modern History at Worcester College, Oxford, earning a BA in 1948 and an MA in 1953, after serving in World War II with the Royal Army Service Corps. Following the war he joined the British Civil Service, eventually reaching the rank of Assistant Secretary at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, before becoming a full-time author in 1974. He is best known for Watership Down (1972), an anthropomorphic novel about a warren of rabbits that gained international acclaim for reinvigorating the animal-fantasy tradition with naturalistic detail, sold over a million copies worldwide, and won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in the early 1970s. His other novels include Shardik (1974), The Plague Dogs (1977), The Girl in a Swing (1980), and Maia (1984). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Winchester in 2015.

Universe(s)

Books

• Watership Down (1972) · Watership Down Core Canon
• Shardik (1974) · The Beklan Empire Core Canon
• Maia (1984) · The Beklan Empire Core Canon
• Tales from Watership Down (1996) · Watership Down Expanded Canon

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 3 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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