The Wolf Road wins 2021 Mal Peet Award

Congratulations to Richard on winning the Mal Peet Award for The Wolf Road — a stunning book about grief and its effect on the mind of a young boy and a lyrical homage to nature and the wild. The Mal Peet award is judged by the East Anglian Book Awards.

The Wolf Road came out in October 2020. A lyrical, finely controlled study of grief, its numbness, rage and eventual dispersal as the protagonist discovers an equally fierce desire to live:

I stood with the wind on my skin. I began to shiver. I couldn’t stop shivering. I set out across the heather. I kept thinking of Debs’ laughter and Nan’s quiet, and even though my body was heavier than it had ever been, I felt empty. Lighter. I was glad of the wind shaking the heather, sifting over my skin and over the mud caking on my skin, and of the sound of the water flowing between the banks. And when the breeze dropped, I heard from a far field the faint bleating of lambs, and somewhere in the mist the wooden-whistle peep-peep of the marsh bird, then blown from somewhere across the marsh, the murmur of voices.