We dug into the Prize archives and uncovered our excellent 2020 interview with Dara McAnulty on his winning book, Diary of a Young Naturalist. Dara was shortlisted in 2022 for his children’s book Wild Child: A Journey through Nature, and is once again on this year’s longlist for A Wild Child’s Book of Birds.
Hello Dara! Where are you talking to me from?
At the moment I’m in County Down, in Northern Ireland, and I’m surrounded by the Mourne Mountains. I’ve always thought of this place as a sort of intersection of the wilds of the sea, the mountains and the forest; this mix, as you seem to get directly in the middle, is sort of where I am, and it’s amazing because everywhere you look there is this diverse variation in how the world and the landscape seems to shift in and out seamlessly. This place is just so beautiful and I love it here.
Well, I’m pleased that you love it there. I’m obviously sorry that we can’t be meeting face to face, but the good thing, obviously, is that we’ve got a lighter carbon footprint doing it this way. I have to start by saying congratulations, you are the youngest ever winner of a major literary prize, you’ve won with your wonderful book, The Diary of a Young Naturalist; you’ve won the Wainwright Prize. So well done!
Thank you, oh, it feels crazy, but what means just that bit more to me, is that this book feels like a youth voice. For me, that feels like almost the most important thing, that maybe, just maybe, some other young people might see this book, and might think about taking up their own voice, because every single voice that we add to a discussion diversifies and enriches it. When I wrote this book, I just wanted to share my view on the world and my experiences, and how that world has shaped me. And I just want to hear everybody else, all these young people out there and their voices, and this prize means that bit more to me because it feels like youth voices can be heard, and we can, even in the world of literature – which has always been seen as older, especially nature writing – be heard. I’ve proved to myself that younger people can write about these diverse and incredible issues, while also exploring the natural world that we live in.
It was widely discussed between the judges that if you were to win this prize, you would reach a younger audience and that was important. And I think that was something that all the judges agreed on. And it’s not because of your age, but alongside your age, why we all agreed that this is an important book; you can be a role model for a generation. And as you’ve said yourself, open up this conversation and inspire younger minds and younger people to explore themselves and nature the way that you have. It’s important to have young role models in this space, and you’ve achieved that now with this book. I mean, you’ve already got great notoriety, and this is obviously going to help it. Are you comfortable with how the book has been perceived? Has everything that you’ve read about the response to it so far warmed your heart?
I think the responses that actually affected me the most, the ones that really touched me, down to every bone in my body and every ounce of my being, were those people who came back and said that the book had changed their outlook on the world, even just slightly. And I feel like that is what books are here for, they’re here to add to and create these new worlds in fiction, or express the real world in nonfiction, and using that as a medium for changing how we observe the world. The fact that people came back to me and said that they saw the world in new ways, it felt almost real; it made it feel a lot more tangible.
Well, it is real and it is tangible and you have reached people in that way. Now the book was edited very sensitively with the help of your family and with Little Toller, your publisher. And it’s important to mention them because they’re a small publisher, a husband and wife team. I think it’s fair to say that this is such a heartfelt project. When you read the edited version of your book were you still happy? Was it still true to your voice?
Yeah, most of the book actually made it through the chopping board and managed to worm its way to the finished copy! There were some areas that I needed to touch up on, and one of the funny things that came out of the editing process is that I think some of it is still retained in the book; there is an actual steady increase in my quality of writing as you go through the book, and there was a lot more evidence of that before the editing process as I got to grips of actually writing a book, which I never really experienced, or had any idea of how to even go about. And when we did the editing process, you could go back over it and see this progress that I had made, and the book had made, and my character within the book had actually made. And some of those technical imperfections still made it through because it almost felt like I was maturing and improving as a person, and I think my writing does improve with it. I found out that reflection that you get with the editing process. I always thought that the editing process would be chop, chop ,chop or change, change, change, but in reality, it was more looking back and seeing what you had written, and trying to put it into the context of the entirety of the book, and I found that to be one of the more surprising things that came out of the book – that discovery.
It does make sense, though, of course it makes sense that you progress throughout the book, because the book charts a year from spring equinox to spring equinox, but the time as well when you turned 15, so of course you were progressing as you were maturing as you were writing. It was also a difficult year for you as well – it was a big year, wasn’t it? You moved house, you changed schools, you had to leave behind a beloved place – the forest that you loved called Big Dog. So a lot of changes for you to struggle through while you were doing this writing. Try to explain if you can to people who perhaps haven’t read the book yet, how does nature ease things for you and how does it make things better? I’m not saying it’s a panacea, and it makes your world beautiful and fault free, but it does a lot for you, doesn’t it?
Well, I think there are multiple effects that nature has on me. First of all, it gives me a place that has no judgement in it; a robin is not going to turn around and tell me, ‘What you’re doing is stupid’. And that sort of freedom in a place where I can just go, and I know that there’s going to be no backlash from it, that I can just relax, and from that it gives me a sort of base grounding point from which I hold an anchor myself in my life. Every time I go out into the forest, I gain almost new layers and old ones are taken away as I go over falls. And this I think is one of the most important things that I found in nature, that when you’re in it you can sort of go into your thought processes in your mind, and pick the problems and the areas that are going wrong and fix them. And there are no distractions that you find from the real world, that will divert you from this course. It’s just you, nature, and your own mind; that presence of being with yourself was really, really important for me because it allowed me to wade my way through all of the mental problems that were going on during that period. Being able to just live with myself for a moment and not have constant views of the outside helped me to heal in that sense.
One of our judges said that they felt your book should be put on the national curriculum now. Have you come across a moment where you found one of your school friends reading your book yet? And how would you feel if that were to be the case, and it became a more frequent occurrence?
One of the things that really surprised me when the book was launched in Australia was that the text publishing house produced teaching materials with the book, and they did it kind of on their own. I just looked on their website one day out of curiosity, and I saw teaching supplies; it took me completely by surprise. I think that the way that people can learn from what I’ve written, it struck me really, really hard. I always think that you can learn from books, but, to be able to learn from mine? That made me feel so warm inside. And the fact that other people, young people, were reading my book and perhaps learning something, that for me feels like almost what my book tried to achieve, or is trying to achieve, which was sharing as much as possible, the joy, the wonder and the beauty of nature in as many ways as possible. I’ve been trying many ways for a few years now, it’s been 10 years of trying in different ways to express the natural world, and seeing those teaching supplies – now it is being proactively shared – was mesmerizing.
You must have been incredibly satisfied and rewarded. And I think people will be learning from your book for many, many years to come, I have to say. Now in the book, obviously nature is at its core, but there were many paragraphs and parts of your story that struck me. You say on one page, ‘Unfortunately for me, I’m different from everyone in my class’. You’re very candid about your autism. In fact, with the exception of your dad, Paul, your whole family are autistic. How important is it for you that this book teaches more people about autism and widens the conversation about that as well as nature?
Well, one of the things that I discovered very early on with being autistic was a few stereotypes, and some stereotypes about autism are quite surprising. The first one that I discovered is that you’ll always know an autistic person when you see them – that is not true. My parents will tell you because I was actually asked, ‘Are you sure you’re autistic?’; my parents will tell you otherwise. And that seeming lack of knowledge was one of the things that I wanted to address in my book. Knowledge and how we understand our world, for me, is the way that we progress in it. I think if more people could learn to understand how we work and how our brains may work, because we’re all completely different, it’s very complicated; but if more people just begin to understand even the tip of the iceberg of what’s going on, then we can journey forward into a more appreciating society. Countless times through my life, I’ve heard autism being used as an insult which feels very, very strange for me, because I wouldn’t count it really as an insult; in some ways for me, it’s been incredible, it’s allowed me to experience the world so much more intensely, although in some situations that kind of backfires, and I want to sort of crawl into a corner.
Do you think that people have a very monochrome view of autism? For example, there’s a belief that if you’re autistic, perhaps you can’t feel emotion, or you’re not sensitive. Clearly, that’s not the case with you. Sometimes there’s a mention of a lack of sense of humour – again, clearly not the case with you. So I think what you’ve managed is to percolate through the best bits of autism and share the best and the worst through the book, and that for me was very evident. So I think from that point of view you should be comforted that you’ve struck the right balance.
Yeah, I was worried about that balance for a while because I wanted it to primarily focus on nature, which it does, but I wanted to express those aspects of autism while keeping nature central, and also keeping all of the other aspects and facets of my life in the book as well because I found that people usually experience other people in one or two dimensions, and especially with autistic people. But in reality, human beings are incredible, we have such a massive range of emotions and personality and feeling. I wanted to try, through the honesty that I put into the book, to show all of those different aspects of myself and all of those aspects that make us human. You cannot address one without looking at all of the others.
Do you feel perhaps more exposed and vulnerable now because you’ve shared so much of yourself with us? Now that you’ve just won a big literary prize? You’re surprisingly positive, actually, about social media – you’ve said it’s opened your world to lots of like-minded people. But we also know that it can be a pretty nasty place. How do you view moving forward; how do you protect yourself from the toxic stuff that’s out there now? Because the more well-known you become, it’s going to be something you’re going to have to deal with more and more.
Yeah, I’ve had a few trolls, and you know what, most of the trolls that I found on Twitter make me laugh half of the time. Once I was called, ‘A brainwashed globalist cultist’ which feels a bit strange. I just laughed because It feels like if you’ve had to go down to that level of insulting to try and diminish my arguments, it feels like, are you even relevant to the argument at all at that point? And if you’re not, why should I care? And using that sort of process of baffling through the trolls, I can just about bear being on social media, which can at times be a very toxic environment. I instead try to show how great it can be at connecting people and bringing together community, and how those people are interacting over an online space and allowing these massive projects and movements to happen. I can just about get over that toxicity because that is such a beautiful thing as humans coming together.
So you’re really focusing on all of the positives and ignoring those negatives. Well, keep doing that is my advice, just roll past the trolls and don’t pay any attention. We need to end soon, but let’s end with something beautiful. Tell me, Dara – your name means oak in Irish, doesn’t it? – what’s your favourite place and what’s your favourite creature?
Well, my favourite place has changed a lot over the years, over writing the book, moving away from Big Dog and discovering new places, new special places that I get annoyed at if I find other people there. I’m going to be broad – since I’ve come to being living near the Mourn Mountains, I’ve come to love being in the high places and up among the clouds. A while back – it was about two weeks ago – me, my dad and my brother, in our craziness, decided to climb Sleeve Binion, which I think is the 3rd tallest of the Moore Mountains, and we decided to do it in the middle of a storm. It was one of the most intense experiences I think I’ve experienced up in the mountains, so we were basically in a cloud at this point. The winds were upwards of about 60-70 miles an hour, and out of the deep, deep fog came this massive stone tor that rose up; it must have been 50 to 75 meters up into the air this massive stone monument. And we came up to it and it sort of was rendered down the middle, and so it became a sort of cleft from which wind would tunnel straight through, and to get to the other side, to get through the mountain, you had to go through this cleft and into the wind; you sort of had to crawl against the tor and move when the winds stopped its gusts. When we got to the other side, just feeling and looking down – it was just fog and this hill that just went straight down. I just stopped because below me and above me and around me was just fog. And amongst the really strong buffeting loud wind, it felt oddly silent. And it’s one of the most powerful experiences that I’ve had up on the mountains, and I think that puts it up there as one of my favourite places.
As for a favourite animal, it changes every single day, depending on what I’ve seen. As a constant, it’s the hen harrier, but other days I kind of go into the insects, or other days I’m into mammals. The hen harrier has always felt like a bird – the male especially – that’s of mist and fog. The way that it spirals and quarters forward and back, and seems to appear out of nowhere, and takes up the entirety of your vision because you’re so concentrated at looking at this incredible bird. So I think I’ll put the hen harrier as my most constant favourite.
It’s been a pleasure talking to you Dara. Your book will be read for years to come; I’m sure we’ll be talking about it for years. You are the winner of this year’s coveted nature writing Wainwright Prize, and we’re all immensely, immensely happy for you.
Thank you so much.
Explore Dara’s latest book A Wild Child’s Book of Birds here.