Conville & Walsh

Conville & Walsh are delighted to announce that Becky Hardie, Editorial Director of Chatto & Windus, has pre-empted the British Commonwealth rights to Africa Watch, the memoir by Alan Root, the acclaimed Kenyan naturalist and film-maker, through Patrick Walsh.

Alan Root is one of the great wildlife pioneers. He started his career making films for the TV series Survival, which started wildlife film-making as we know it, and is responsible for numerous groundbreaking documentaries and natural history discoveries. His friends and colleagues have included Dian Fossey, George and Joy Adamson and David Attenborough, to whom he is particularly close. His wife and long-term collaborator was Joan Root, who was tragically murdered in 2006 in retaliation for her environmental campaigning in Kenya.

‘Chatto is excited and proud to be publishing Alan,’ said Becky Hardie. ‘The sheer quality of his material – his stories about black mambas, hyenas, gorillas, ballooning over Kilimanjaro – is a dream. And he also has this unique, long-view perspective on environmental change that underpins it all. But above all, the way he writes about animals and the landscape – close up, as if he’s watching through one of his beloved camera lenses – is superb.’

Root has many firsts to his name. He has reported numerous previously unknown animal behaviours (the fact that hyenas hunt as well as scavenge, for instance), was the first to film hippos and crocodiles underwater and ballooned across the Serengeti to record the great migrations. He also showed Dian Fossey her first mountain gorilla.

All of which has taken its toll, as Alan explains: ‘I have been bitten by a leopard (in the buttocks); by a hippo (which left a hole right the way through my thigh); by a puff adder (whose bite took off a finger); and by a mountain gorilla (who picked me up, bit me and then threw me down a hill for good measure). I have also had my fair share of near-death experiences in the balloons, planes and helicopters which I have flown.’

Africa Watch will be a unique document and a superlative book about wildlife, Africa and the environment. It will blend extraordinary observation of animals and the landscape with hair-raising adventure. It will span the Kuki Gallman and George Adamson market, with shades of Born Free and Out of Africa, selling to those who love African memoirs as well as wildlife and adventure fans. Alan is a perfect addition to Chatto, whose list of illustrious nature and travel writers include Richard Mabey, Stephen Moss, Colin Thubron and Tim Butcher.

The story of Alan’s thirty years with Joan, and then her tragic murder, has been bought for development as a feature film with Working Title in association with Julia Roberts’s company in LA (triggered by a Vanity Fair piece about Joan by Mark Seal, which then became a book called Wildflower published by Weidenfeld in the UK and in the States by Random House). The only person who hasn’t spoken on this subject is Alan. In Africa Watch, he will do so for the first time.

Jeremy Bradshaw, formerly of Tigress Productions in London, is currently planning to re-release fifteen of Alan Root’s most famous natural history films in the spring of 2012 to coincide with hardback publication of Africa Watch by Chatto & Windus.