Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe

"I tend to be a bit suspicious of nature writing, because it can be rather fey. A lot of nature writers fall in love with the sound of their own writing—not a sunset goes undescribed. So I approached this book with a certain amount of prejudice, but that dissolved straight away. He’s a beautiful writer and makes it look easy. Adam Weymouth is doing a number of things in the book. It’s nature writing, and it’s a travelogue. It’s also about the politics of conservation—because I hadn’t realized the extent to which wolves had made a comeback. The wolf, Slavc, goes on a journey from Slovenia, across bits of Austria, into Italy. You’ve got the drama of following this wolf and, along the way, the author talks to farmers, to hunters, to people who don’t want to see the wolf return. When you realize how wolves kill their prey…those poor cows, it’s quite dramatic. He talks to lots of different people to give you a picture of the politics of conservation. Should we re-wild? Should we have more large carnivores roaming the European landscape again? He’s very evenhanded and allows everyone their voice. He’s very good at describing these rural communities which are completely forgotten about. That also allows him to get into the politics of populism. One of the mayors he talks to in a small Italian town—who’s on the populist right—uses opposing the return of the wolf as a way of getting elected. A lot of people are frightened of these animals roaming around, killing their livestock. So Adam Weymouth does a lot in the book, and he does it with grace and lightness, and he pulls you through. Because if you’d asked me, ‘Do you want to read a book about the politics of conservation and whether EU subsidies should direct the countryside towards rewilding?’ I would have said no, but I did. It is very moving. He’s on the trail of this wolf 10 years later, but you get a real sense of a wolf in a landscape—trying to cross a motorway or railway tracks and thinking, ‘Oh no, I’ve got this far, and now there are a lot of humans around here. I’d better go a few hundred kilometres to get around the other way.’ He doesn’t do it in a soppy way. But, nonetheless, there are moments when you really get a sense of what the wolf must have seen and felt, and then it is a bit heartbreaking at the end."

"This, as I’ve already said, is perhaps not a typical Pol Roger Duff Cooper book. It’s a mix of nature, environment and travel writing in which Adam Weymouth travels in the footsteps of a tagged wolf called Slavc, from Slovenia all the way through to Italy. But it’s so beautifully written, and goes so far beyond the usual remit of a nature book, that it leapt onto the prize shortlist. Weymouth’s first book, Kings of the Yukon , was about a 2,000-mile trip he took across Alaska in a kayak. What that book did brilliantly was mix absolutely exceptional nature writing with inquiries into the tensions between nature and humans along the river. He does something similar with this new book. Here he walks from Slovenia all the way to Italy, following in Slavc’s tracks and stopping along the way to take the temperature of the different regions through which he passes. Everywhere he walks, he meets people who are affected by the growing number of wolves. (There used to be almost no wolves in the region, but now, partly because of Slavc, there are hundreds of them.) What he charts in the book—brilliantly, in my opinion—are the tensions this increased presence creates in the human community through which he and Slavc walk. Weymouth is an exceptional writer, someone very much in the mould of Robert Macfarlane , and he writes as beautifully as Macfarlane does about nature. He also loves to explore the tensions between man and animals, and does so exceptionally well. So in every country he goes through, he looks at the fear that the wolves cause, the resentment that the protection of the wolves by the EU causes amongst farming communities, and how the wolves become emblematic of much broader political tensions between local communities and central government, and how populism becomes caught up in this duel. So it becomes not just a piece of nature writing. It becomes, in many places, a book about the politics of modern Europe and about the tensions between populism and liberalism. It is an extraordinary achievement. The winner of the 2026 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize will be announced on 16 March"