Richard Adams

Richard George Adams (born May 9 1920 in Newbury, Berkshire, England) is a British novelist who is best known for two novels with animal characters, Watership Down and The Plague Dogs.

Adams served in the British Army from 1940 through 1946, during World War II. He was given a Class B discharge to continue his studies and in 1948 he received a master's degree from Worcester College at Oxford University. He was a senior civil servant who worked as an Assistant Secretary for the Department of Agriculture, later part of the Department of the Environment, from 1948 to 1974. Since 1974, following publication of his second novel Shardik, he has been a full-time author.

He originally began telling the story of Watership Down to his two daughters Juliet and Rosamund, and they insisted he publish it as a book. It took two years to write and was rejected by thirteen publishers. When Watership Down was finally published, it quickly became a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, selling over a million copies in record time in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Watership Down has become a modern classic and won the Carnegie Medal in 1972. To date, Adam's best-known work has sold over 50 million copies world-wide, earning him more than all his other books put together.

He also contested the 1983 general election, standing as an Independent Conservative in the Spelthorne constituency on a platform of opposition to fox hunting.

He now lives, with his wife, within 10 miles of his birthplace and his latest novel will be published this year (2006).

Books

• Watership Down (1972)
• Beklan Empire
  • Shardik (1974)
  • Maia (1984)
• Nature Through the Seasons (1975)
• The Plague Dogs (1977)
• The Adventures & Brave Deeds Of The Ship's Cat On The Spanish Maine: Together With The Most Lamentable Losse Of The Alcestis & Triumphant Firing Of The Port Of Chagres (1977)
• The Girl in a Swing (1980)
• The Iron Wolf and Other Stories (1980, also published as The Unbroken Web)
• The Legend of Te Tuna (1982)
• Voyage Through the Antarctic (1982)
• Traveller (1988)
• The Day Gone By (autobiography) (1990)
• Tales from Watership Down (collection of linked stories) (1996)
• The Outlandish Knight (1999)

External links

• Richard Adams at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Richard Adams at the Internet Book List
• Richard Adams at the Internet Book Database of Fiction
• Richard Adams At Eighty
• 1985 Audio Interview with Richard Adams - RealAudio (28 min. 55 sec.)