Watership Down heard of." Fred Inglis, in his book "The Promise of Happiness: Value and meaning in children's fiction", praises the author’s use of prose to express the strangeness of ordinary human inventions from the rabbits' perspective. "Watership Down"'s universal motifs of liberation and self-determination have led to the tendency of minority groups to read their own narrative into the novel, despite the author's assurance (in 2005) that it "was never intended to become some sort of allegory or parable." The author Rachel Kadish, reflecting on her own superimposition of the founding of Israel onto "Watership Down", has remarked "Turns out plenty
Watership Down Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice. In 1977 California schoolchildren selected it for the inaugural California Young Reader Medal in the Young Adult category, which annually honours one book from the last four years. In The Big Read, a 2003 survey of the British public, it was voted the forty-second greatest book of all time. The 1993 Puffin Modern Classics edition of the novel contains an afterword by Nicholas Tucker, who wrote that stories such as "Watership Down" "now fit rather uneasily into the modern world of consideration of both sexes". He contrasted