Richard George Adams FRSL was an English novelist. He is best known for his debut novel Watership Down.

Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published in 1972. Set in Hampshire in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment with burrows, they are anthropomorphized (the act of attributing human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities), and the wildlife in the story possesses its own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home, the hill of Watership Down, encountering perils and temptations along the way.

Watership Down was Richard Adams’s debut novel. It was rejected by several publishers before Collings accepted the manuscript; the published book then won the annual Carnegie Medal (UK), annual Guardian Prize (UK), and other book awards.

The novel was adapted into a 2D animated feature film in 1978 and a 2D animated children’s television series from 1999 and 2001. In 2018, the novel was adapted again, this time into a 3D animated series, which both aired in the UK and was made available on Netflix.