Author: Piers Torday

Brilliant to learn today that Tree Thing, illustrated by Matthew Taylor Wilson, has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Children’s Fiction!

The Wainwright Prize, the UK’s foremost nature and conservation writing awards, today announced their 2026 shortlists. The awards showcase writing that reflects the values of its namesake, Alfred Wainwright: the celebration of nature and our environment, nurturing respect for our planet, and informing readers of the threats that the earth currently faces.

This year’s dynamic shortlist consists of books exploring nature in a variety of ways, with many celebrating the intelligence of the natural world from migrating whales and trees as living communities, to the tiny lives of insects and complex fungi networks.

Prize winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on Thursday 17^th September 2026 at the spectacular Elmley Nature Reserve in Kent, hosted by Wainwright Prize ambassador and The Times journalist and environmental writer Henry Bird. In addition to the six individual category winners, two exceptional titles will be honoured as the overall winners of The Wainwright Prize: one for adult writing and one for children’s writing. These will be chosen from the respective category winners and will be celebrated as the 2026 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year and the 2026 Wainwright Children’s Prize Book of the Year. Both overall winners will receive £2,500, with the remaining category winners each awarded £500.

Of this year’s shortlist, Wainwright Prize ambassador and 2026 host, Henry Bird, says: “Each of the categories for this year’s Wainwright Prize reflects the remarkable breadth of stories and ideas explored through environmental literature. Over the past few weeks of reading, I’ve traversed bogs and scaled treetops, been transported thousands of years into the past and generations ahead to the future, felt pangs of despair at what this world has lost and glimmers of hope at what it stands to gain. With the natural world in crisis, I’d go so far as to say that we need these books, now more than ever.”

The 2026 Children’s Wainwright Prize for Fiction shortlist is:

• The Waters and the Wild, Eilish Fisher, illustrated by David Rooney (Penguin Random House Children’s UK Puffin)
• The Green Kingdom, Cornelia Funke and Tammi Hartung, illustrated by Melissa Castrillón (DK flip)
• The Lone Husky, Hannah Gold, illustrated by Levi Pinfold (HarperCollins Children’s Books)
• Swanfall, Sophie Kirtley (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
• The Adventures of Portly the Otter: Untold Tales From the Wind in the Willows, M.G. Leonard, illustrated by Polly Dunbar (Farshore, HarperCollins)
• The Danger of Small Things, Caryl Lewis (Simon & Schuster Children’s Books)
• Birdlands, Anthony McGowan, illustrated by Keith Robinson (Rock the Boat, Oneworld Publications)
• Tree Thing, Piers Torday, illustrated by Matthew Taylor Wilson (Quercus Children’s Books)

Tree Thing, illustrated by Matthew Taylor Wilson, has been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Children’s Fiction 2026.

The Wainwright Prizes are the UK’s foremost awards celebrating nature, conservation, and environmental writing. Named in honour of Alfred Wainwright, writer, walker, and champion of the outdoors, the prizes were established in 2013 to spotlight the growing genre of nature writing and inspire readers to connect more deeply with the natural world.

I wrote Tree Thing to encourage children to wonder about the mystery of our natural world, in particular the deep and deepening mystery of trees and how they grow, communicate and change in order to renew and survive our changing world. It’s a privilege to see that recognised today, alongside a list of completely fabulous books for children on nature and conservation.