Puffin will publish the children’s edition of palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands, a commercial and critical hit on the Earth’s pre-historic past. Halliday, and illustrator Gavin Scott, will adapt the title with Puffin senior commissioning editor Tom Rawlinson.
The publisher acquired world rights from Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan Associates, through Puffin’s former senior commissioning editor Emily Lunn. Rights to Scott’s illustrations were bought from Robyn Newton at The Bright Agency. The new version will be released in September 2025, with Puffin saying it will “appeal to all dinosaur-loving readers aged eight and above”. Halliday will also be publishing a new adult title on the ancient supercontinent Pagaea with Allen Lane that autumn.
Otherlands: An Illustrated Journey Throug Earth’s Lost Worlds was orignally published by Puffin’s sister division Penguin Press in 2022. It was a hit at the tills, shifting over 90,000 copies through Nielsen BookScan UK alone, and has been sold into 17 territories. It was shortlisted Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
The Scottish Highlands-raised Halliday is an honorary research fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Birmingham. Otherland was his first book for general readers.
He said: “Many children may know about dinosaurs, but they are a tiny portion of the history of life. I want to explore several places where scientists have been able to reconstruct whole ecosystems in fantastic detail, showing us how life has followed the same rules and faced many of the same challenges over a long period of time. By looking into the past, with the worlds brought to life by [Scott’s] art, I hope that children can learn not just about how the world used to be, but how it has always, and continues, to work.”
Scott said that calling illustrating Otherlands a career highlight would be “somewhat of an understatement. I grew up devouring books about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, endlessly drawing and redrawing pictures of tyrannosaurs, sauropods and sabre-toothed cats in my sketchbooks. So when Puffin approached me… I didn’t think twice.”
