Adam Weymouth in conversation with The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize?

I’m absolutely thrilled. The prize has a backlist of incredible winners, and I’m awed to be in such company. A book begins as a tiny seed of an idea, and for it to grow into something that gets such prestigious recognition feels quite unreal.

What drew you to the subject of Lone Wolf?

Writing on the environment, I’m accustomed to covering stories that feel pretty hopeless. I was drawn to the wolf’s return to Europe because it runs counter to that narrative. Who could have predicted this? If the wolf, once one of the most reviled creatures, “the beast of waste and desolation,” is thriving in Europe once again, it asks us what else might be possible.

I’m also fascinated by the wolf because it provokes such strong opinions. We haven’t had a wild wolf in the UK for at least two centuries, but everyone knows how they feel about them. It’s hard to think of a comparable animal, one that stirs up such fierce emotions, of both love and hate. That makes it a fantastic subject to write about, and a fantastic way in to interrogating peoples’ lives. I quickly came to realise that when we speak about the wolf, we’re never only speaking about the wolf.

How did you plan, research and write Lone Wolf?

It was a long time in the planning. I first travelled to Lessinia, where Slavc, the wolf I followed, made his home, in 2019, but then everything was put on hold for two years for Covid. During that time I spoke frequently with Hubert Potočnik, the researcher at the University of Ljubljana, who had placed the GPS collar on Slavc, and who had tracked him across Europe. Hubert was integral to the planning of the book. Slavc had had already been well studied in the scientific community, but no one had done a journey like this.

Finally, in early 2022, I was able to set off in Slavc’s footsteps. I spent much of that year walking across Slovenia, Austria and Italy, speaking with those who I met along the way. I write a lot when I’m travelling – ideally every night, once I’ve put up the tent – and I came home with stacks of notes which I then set about shaping into a first draft. I went back to many of the places that I had visited in 2023, often with a translator, to flesh out some of the stories I had found. I also returned to Lessinia many times, to get a sense of the place over the course of the seasons, and to see how the lives of those who lived there were changing since the wolf’s return.

What were the surprises you encountered along the way?

This way of researching is all about the surprises. There is something about being on a long slow journey that makes the magic happen; those moments it is impossible to plan for but that bring the book alive. There was the family who invited me to stay in their house one night, who it transpired collected antique posters of fairytales, including Little Red Riding Hood. It was my path leading through some of the last towns in Austria were people were executed as werewolves. It was stumbling across Modesto, now in his 80s, the last farmer in Lessinia to practice the traditional transhumance.

I also wasn’t expecting to find how politicised the wolf has become. Our relationship to the wolf is one of the world’s oldest culture wars, and with its return to Europe we have entered a brand new chapter. The wolf has become a symbol of the EU, and politicians are courting farmers who want their numbers brought under control. The wolf is a scapegoat for a a range of far more complex problems, and it represents a fear of change that is now being preyed upon by the far right.

Tell us how Lone Wolf can be seen as a continuation or a departure from your earlier books?

My previous book, Kings of the Yukon is about the collapse of a species, whereas Lone Wolf is about a resurgence, and the broad themes behind the books are fairly different. Yet it’s a continuation in as much as its about following an animal, and using that animal as a way in to explore the forces that are shaping peoples’ lives, bringing human stories of politics, history, climate, into the natural history of an animal. And it’s also a continuation in that it is about travelling slowly as a form of research. It’s something I first did when, in my twenties, I walked from England to Istanbul. For Kings of the Yukon I canoed two thousand miles down the Yukon River to explore why the salmon was disappearing. Moving slowly is the best way I’ve found of getting to grips with a place, and it gives me a much better impression of somewhere than if I was a passive observer. The same goes for making connections with people. Often those I’m interviewing aren’t particularly comfortable with journalists, but I find people respond to me in a completely different way when I’m making the time to connect with where they live. Both books have a focus on trying to make space for unheard voices, and to listen carefully, without judgement, to a wide range of opinions.

What advice would you give a writer of non-fiction starting out today, given the current publishing climate?

It’s often hard to shake the feeling that we’re working in a dying industry, and I’m often being told that the market is terrible just now – that books have been supplanted by podcasts, that no one can concentrate anymore. Yet the bookshops certainly seemed busy over Christmas. Reading feels like an increasingly radical act to me, in a world of diminishing attention and partisan agendas. There’s a real need to be able to wrestle with complex questions right now, and I don’t know of anything that can better do that than a book. It’s still where I turn, whether it’s to novels or non-fiction, both for their simple beauty and for a better understanding of our world.