Dara McAnulty

Little Toller, a small Dorset press, published Diary of a Young Naturalist in 2020, written when its author was fourteen and fifteen. It runs a year in which the McAnulty family moves from County Fermanagh to the mountains of County Down, and sets the upheaval of that move beside a season-by-season record of the wildlife around him. Dara McAnulty, his mother, his brother Lorcan and his sister Bláthnaid are autistic; his father is a conservation scientist. The diary won the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing in 2020, when McAnulty was sixteen and the youngest ever recipient, and the British Book Award for narrative non-fiction in 2021. He had taken the RSPB Medal in 2019, and received the British Empire Medal in 2023. Two children's titles illustrated by Barry Falls came next, Wild Child in 2021 and A Wild Child's Book of Birds in 2022, each shortlisted for the Wainwright children's prize. He later read natural sciences at Queens' College, Cambridge.