The 2026 Wainwright Prize winners: what to read next

The Wainwright Prizes were handed out on Thursday evening at Elmley Nature Reserve in Kent, and the headline is one most readers of this site will enjoy: The Book of Birds, by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane, took the 2026 Book of the Year.

It is Macfarlane's second Wainwright, after Underland in 2019. For Jackie Morris it is a first win, though not a first appearance — the pair were shortlisted in 2018 for The Lost Words. The judges called this one "an utterly beautiful book to treasure", and singled out the chemistry between writer and illustrator, which is really the point of the book. It asks not what a bird is, but who it is.

Here is the full list, and what we would actually pick up first.

Book of the Year

The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton). Also winner of the Illustrative Books category, which tells you where its weight lies. This is a book to be looked at as much as read, built around Britain's declining bird species and the case for paying attention to them before they go. If you have shelved The Lost Words where children can reach it, this belongs beside it.

Nature Writing

Ancient: Reviving the Woods That Made Britain by Luke Barley (Profile Books). Ancient woodland is one of those subjects that sounds settled and is not: what survives, how it got that way, and what reviving it would actually involve. Barley's argument is that these woods are a working inheritance rather than a museum piece. Good company for anyone who has walked through a wood and wondered why it is shaped the way it is.

Conservation Writing

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness by Cal Flyn (William Collins). Flyn's Islands of Abandonment made her name by looking hard at places people had left. This one turns the question around and asks what we mean by wilderness at all — whether the remotest places are as untouched as the word implies, and what preserving them would mean if they are not. It is the most provoking book on the list, in the best sense.

The children's prizes

The Children's Book of the Year went to Otherlands: An Illustrated Journey Through Earth's Lost Worlds, adapted by Thomas Halliday from his own bestseller and illustrated by Gavin Scott. The adult Otherlands was highly commended at the 2022 prize; the judges here called this version "a breakthrough children's classic". It also took the Children's Non-Fiction category.

Children's Fiction went to The Danger of Small Things by Caryl Lewis (Simon & Schuster Children's Books), and the Picture Book prize to The Great Bear by Annie Booker (Two Hoots).

Where to start, if you are starting

If the Macfarlane win has sent you looking, the obvious first step is not The Book of Birds. It is a beautiful object, but it is a collaboration and an illustrated one, and it will make more sense once you know the voice.

Start instead with The Old Ways, which follows old paths, tracks and sea roads and is the most walkable of his books. Then The Wild Places, which is where the project really begins. Underland is the ambitious one and the previous Wainwright winner. Is a River Alive? is the most recent, and the most argumentative. Landmarks is the one about words themselves, and the closest in spirit to what he and Morris have been doing together.

One note on timing, since a prize list sends people straight to the shops. Ancient is currently a hardback, with the paperback not due until March 2027 — so if you want it cheap, you are waiting a while. The Savage Landscape is already out in paperback.