🇬🇧 Dara McAnulty

The book is structured as a single year, spring to spring, written from Northern Ireland — Castlewellan and the Mourne country in County Down, and later Fermanagh. It is not a nature diary in the conventional identify-and-record sense. McAnulty is autistic, and the book braids his own perception of the natural world with the experience of navigating a school system and a social world that were frequently hostile to it. That combination is why it worked: the writing is not describing nature from a comfortable distance but reporting on it as the thing that made an otherwise unbearable environment survivable.

The Wainwright Prize is judged against adult professional nature writers — biologists, travel writers, established literary essayists — with no age category and no allowance. Winning it at sixteen was not a special award; it was the award. "Miraculous things can happen," he said at the time. The book went on to collect further prizes and to be published internationally, and it has become a fixture on reading lists for readers who came to it through neurodiversity rather than through birdwatching.

The RSPB Medal, which he received in 2019 before the book was published, recognised campaigning rather than writing. McAnulty had been blogging about wildlife since he was twelve, and had already become a public advocate on species decline, hen harrier persecution and the politics of land use in Northern Ireland. "It's my passion to help protect our environment by teaching others all about animal conservation. I especially love birds!" he has said. The medal placed a fifteen-year-old on a list of recipients that reads as a roll call of British conservation.

He has been consistent about the collective framing of the work. "Working together to bring about the changes we so desperately need for a healthy planet needs everyone to understand what's at stake," he has said, "and I do feel that young people have elevated that, in partnership with experts and organisations." The formulation is worth noting because it declines the role the media most wanted to give him — the lone child prophet — in favour of describing himself as one part of an alliance that includes the scientists who supply the evidence.

The 2026 shortlisting matters for a specific reason. Child prodigies in literature are usually a one-book phenomenon: the precocity is the story, and the second book, arriving without it, disappears. McAnulty, now in his twenties, is back on the shortlist of the same prize he won at sixteen, in open competition, with the novelty long gone. That is the transition most young writers do not make.