Battle of Arnhem audience, as did Richard Attenborough's adaptation of the book into the film of the same name in 1977. Frost, Urquhart and Arnhem veteran John Waddy were hired as military consultants. English author Richard Adams, himself an officer in the seatail of 250th (Airborne) Light Company, Royal Army Service Corps, based the struggle of the anthropomorphised rabbits in his award-winning 1972 novel "Watership Down" (adapted into an animated film in 1978) on the adventures of the officers of the 250 Company of the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem. Battle of Arnhem The Battle of Arnhem was a major battle of the
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