The Biggest Footprint: Eight billion humans. One clumsy giant written by Rob Sears, illustrated by Tom Sears, and published by Canongate Books, is the winner of the Wainwright Prize for Children’s Nature & Conservation Writing 2022.
Complex environmental issues are tackled in highly original and imaginative ways in The Biggest Footprint by writer/illustrator brothers Rob and Tom Sears, who re-imagine the whole of humanity as one massive giant to personalise the issue of climate change for younger readers and show how humans can do a better job of looking after our planet.
The 2022 Yoto Carnegie Medal winner, October, October by Katya Balen, Illustrated by Angela Harding (Bloomsbury) was Highly Commended.
Awards were also made for nature writing and conservation writing:
2022 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing
Winner: Goshawk Summer: The Diary of an Extraordinary Season in the Forest by James Aldred (Elliott & Thompson).
Highly Commended: Otherlands: A World in the Making by Dr Thomas Halliday (Allen Lane) and On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging by Nicola Chester (Chelsea Green Publishing).
2022 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing
Winner: Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino (Jonathan Cape).
Highly Commended: Wild Fell: Fighting for Nature on a Lake District Hill Farm by Lee Schofield (Doubleday).
Named after nature writer Alfred Wainwright, the prizes are awarded to the work which best reflects Wainwright’s core values and include a celebration of nature and our natural environment or a warning of the dangers to it across the globe. For more about the prize and the winners, see the Wainwright Prize website.
