It is with a heavy heart that we note the death of Richard Adams, author of the seminal Watership Down, with its wonderful act of imagination, the invention of a Lapine language.

As one critic noted, Watership Down “is much more like A Clockwork Orange: a book so confidently lodged in an alternative universe with its own rules and conventions that it even has its own language.”

As interest in ecologically informed literature continues to grow, Richard Adams’s achievements are likely to swell similarly in stature over time.