Raising Hare wins the Wainwright Prize book of the year

Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare, published by Canongate, has won the 2025 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and the prize's overall book of the year award. The winners were announced on 10 September 2025 at FarmED in Oxfordshire.

The book is a debut. It describes how Dalton, then working in London, raised a young hare in the countryside during the Covid lockdown. The conservation writing prize went to Guy Shrubsole's The Lie of the Land, published by William Collins, which argues for greater transparency about who owns land in Britain.

Children's book of the year went to Flower Block by Lanisha Butterfield, illustrated by Hoang Giang and published by Puffin, also a debut. The overall winners receive £2,500 and each category winner £500. Other category awards went to George Steinmetz's Feed the Planet, Brogen Murphy's Wildlands and Secrets of Bees by Ben Hoare and Nina Chakrabarti.

Nature writing is a crowded field, and a debut built on close observation of a single animal winning the top award suggests that readers still respond to the particular over the panoramic. The conservation category, meanwhile, keeps land ownership and access on the agenda of a prize read by a general audience.

Source: Wainwright Prize: the 2025 winners.