The Wainwright Prize Shortlist 2025 for Nature Writing

The Wainwright Prize, first awarded in 2014, is a literary prize that seeks to reward the best British outdoors, nature and travel writing. The prize is named in honour of Alfred Wainwright (1907-1991), the British author, illustrator and hillwalker who is most well-known for his seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, published between 1955-1966. After having been renamed several times to acknowledge sponsors, as of 2025, the prize is financed by publishers with shortlisted titles, and the name has reverted simply to the Wainwright Prize.

Since 2025, the Wainwright Prize includes three categories. There is a category to cover conservation writing, a new category for illustrative books, while here we present the twelve longlisted candidates for nature writing.

Previous year’s winners are Michael Malay's Late Light (2024), Amy-Jane Beer's The Flow (2023), James Aldred's Goshawk Summer (2022) James Rebanks's English Pastoral (2021), Dara McAnulty's Diary of a Young Naturalist (2020), Robert Macfarlane's Underland (2019), Adam Nicolson's The Seabird's Cry (2018), John Lewis-Stempel's Where Poppies Blow (2017), Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016), John Lewis-Stempel’s Meadowland (2015), and Hugh Thomson’s The Green Road Into The Trees (2014).