1920-2016 · English novelist, author of Watership Down
About Richard Adams
Richard Adams (1920–2016) was born in Newbury, Berkshire, and grew up in the countryside near the downs where his novel is set. He read history at Worcester College, Oxford, before and after serving in the Second World War with the Royal Army Service Corps, attached to airborne forces, including the Arnhem operation of 1944. He then worked for many years as a civil servant in the Ministry of Housing and the Department of the Environment. Watership Down, his first novel, began as stories told to his daughters; its success let him write full time, and he followed it with Shardik, The Plague Dogs and Tales from Watership Down.
Watership Down is the epic of a small band of rabbits who leave their home to found a new one. In the Sandleford warren in Berkshire, a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver, who has visions, sees the field covered in blood and begs his brother Hazel to warn the Chief Rabbit, the Threarah, who dismisses them.