An Inconvenience of Penguins: Epic voyages in pursuit of the world's most beloved bird: Longlisted for the 2026 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing

'An epic quest - in which the journey is at least as entertaining as the end result'
Stephen Moss, author of Ten Birds That Changed the World

'Humorous, touching and refreshingly unsentimental'
Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road

'Highly entertaining and gloriously obsessional'
Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan

'A wise, rude, hilarious and oddly moving account'
Ed Caesar, author of The Moth and the Mountain

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The problem started, as problems often do, with a penguin.

From Kings and Emperors to Macaronis and Rockhoppers, penguins are one of the most immediately recognisable animals on Earth. Yet for all that familiarity, what do we really know about them? An Inconvenience of Penguins follows award-winning travel writer Jamie Lafferty as he visits all eighteen species in a bid to understand the birds and their extraordinarily varied habitats a little better. On voyages to some of the planet's most inaccessible and challenging landscapes, he recounts the history of our unique relationship with the world's most popular bird, telling not only the stories of the penguins, but also the people and places around them.

From getting stranded in the Galapagos and marching through African guano fields to leading photography groups in the Antarctic and taking psychedelics on the Falklands, this is a birding quest like no other. Along the way, Lafferty relives the experiences of early polar explorers, for whom penguins were perplexing mysteries, welcome companions and even occasional meals, and meets the modern penguin lovers trying to save their fragile environments.

Featuring cameos from a wide cast of characters including Ernest Shackleton, Charles Darwin and Sir Francis Drake, as well as beautiful photographs of each penguin species, An Inconvenience of Penguins is part love-letter to and part biography of these remarkable creatures.