Watership Down publishers before Collings accepted it, it won the annual Carnegie Medal, annual Guardian Prize, and other book awards. It was adapted into an animated feature film in 1978, and later a television series which ran from 1999 to 2001. Later, a miniseries of the story was made and aired in the UK in 2018. Adams completed a sequel almost 25 years later, "Tales from Watership Down" (Random House, 1996; Hutchinson and Alfred A. Knopf imprints). It is a collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren, with "Notes on Pronunciation" and "Lapine Glossary".
Richard Adams it as a book. He began writing in 1966, taking two years to complete it. In 1972, after four publishers and three writers' agencies turned down the manuscript, Rex Collings agreed to publish the work. The book gained international acclaim almost immediately for reinvigorating anthropomorphic fiction with naturalism. Over the next few years "Watership Down" sold over a million copies worldwide. Adams won both of the most prestigious British children's book awards, one of six authors to do so: the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. In 1974, following publication of his second novel, "Shardik", he left the