Richard Adams (1920-2016), the son of a country doctor, grew up in Berkshire and studied history at Worcester College, Oxford before and after the Second World War, in which he served in the 1st Airborne Division. The author of more than a dozen works, he originally began telling the story of Watership Down, his first book, to his two daughters to while away a long car journey to Stratford-on-Avon. They insisted he write it down and it became a huge success on publication with people of all ages, winning both the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Carnegie Medal. Watership Down (the illustrated edition of which was published by Oneworld, 2014) is now considered a modern classic. Along with another of his books, Shardik (Oneworld, 2014), Watership Down was listed in the Sunday Times top 100 bestselling books of the last forty years.