Nature and conservation writing's biggest UK prize has revealed its 2026 shortlists, with 43 books across six categories vying for honours at a September ceremony at Kent's Elmley Nature Reserve.

Illustrator Jackie Morris leads this year's field with three shortlisted titles — a picture book, The Summer Puppy, created with Cathy Fisher, and two entries in the Illustrative Books category: Wild Folk: Tales from the Stones, with Tamsin Abbott, and The Book of Birds, with Robert Macfarlane. Macfarlane himself now holds the record for the most nominations in the prize's history, having racked up his seventh and eighth appearances on a Wainwright shortlist this year — the second coming via Firefly, a picture book illustrated by Luke Adam Hawker.

Three former winners return to contention. Macfarlane, who took the Nature Writing prize in 2019 for Underland, is joined by Dara McAnulty, 2020's winner for Diary of a Young Naturalist, now shortlisted for A Wild Child's Guide to Nature at Night. Amy-Jane Beer, who won in 2023 for The Flow, is nominated for the picture book A River Running Through You.

The Nature Writing category ranges widely, from Harriet Rix's The Genius of Trees and Luke Barley's Ancient to Fiona Robertson's Stone Lands, a memoir of grief refracted through Britain's ancient megaliths. Conservation Writing, meanwhile, takes in Suzanne Simard's When the Forest Breathes and Rose George's investigation into the global fishing trade, Every Last Fish, alongside Dr Julia Shaw's Green Crime, which turns its attention to the psychology of environmental destruction.

Illustrative Books offers two striking studies of water — Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Bill François's Freshwater, and David Gilbey's Waterlands — alongside Alison Pouliot's fungal photo-journey Funga Obscura.

Among the children's categories, whales surface twice in the Picture Books list, via Yuval Zommer's The Whale That Sings in the Deep and Nicola Davies and Britta Teckentrup's Whale Song, while Robert Macfarlane's Firefly and Amy-Jane Beer's A River Running Through You both come from the independent press Magic Cat, which accounts for two of the shortlist's strongest showings among the 34 publishers represented. Almost a third of those publishers are independents — a healthy sign for a sector often dominated by the big houses.

The Fiction shortlist leans heavily on animal companionship, from Hannah Gold's arctic adventure The Lone Husky to Anthony McGowan's Birdlands, while Caryl Lewis's dystopian The Danger of Small Things — in which bees have vanished and young women are conscripted to pollinate crops by hand — offers a darker note for young adult readers. In Non-Fiction, Ben Hoare returns as reigning children's category winner, this time nominated for Shapes of Nature.

Category winners will each receive £500, with the overall Book of the Year in both adult and children's strands worth £2,500 apiece. The ceremony, on 17 September, will be hosted by Wainwright ambassador and Times environmental writer Henry Bird, who called this year's selection proof that "we need these books, now more than ever."

New judging panels — chaired across the six categories by figures including Guardian biodiversity reporter Phoebe Weston, ornithologist Mya Rose-Craig and 2024 winner Michael Malay — will now choose the eventual winners from a shortlist selected by an academy of booksellers, nature specialists and authors from across the UK.

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