Lone Wolf: walking the faultlines of Europe - Adam Weymouth

In 2011, a young wolf named Slavc set out from Slovenia. Tracked by GPS, he travelled 1,000 miles through the Alps, crossing Slovenia and then Austria. He swam huge rivers, crossed six-lane highways, and climbed to mountain passes in the very depths of winter.

Four months later he arrived on the Lessinian plateau, north of Verona, and there he crossed paths with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. The only two wolves for thousands of square miles had somehow found each other, and the pack they formed was the first in these mountains for more than a century.

A decade later and there are more than a hundred wolves back in the region, the result of their remarkable meeting.

The European wolf is undergoing an incredible resurgence. Once on the brink of extinction, they are now back in every mainland country on the continent, a species of least concern. But everywhere that the wolf has returned, the fear and hatred has come back too.

For Lone Wolf, Adam Weymouth walked Slavc's path a decade on. He spoke with the farmers, the hunters and the shepherds learning to live alongside it once again.

But the wolf is not the only change facing these wild corners of Europe. Here, the call to rewild meets the urge to preserve culture; nationalism and globalisation pull apart; climate change is radically changing lives; and migrants, too, are on the move.

Lone Wolf looks at all those grappling with the animals' return, as their own worlds shift about them at an ever-accelerating rate.

About the speaker

Adam Weymouth is writer and journalist, living on the south-east coast of England. His work has appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, the BBC, The Atlantic and Granta. 

His first book, Kings of the Yukon (Penguin, 2018), tells the story of a five month canoe trip across Canada and Alaska, examining the decline of the king salmon and how that decline is impacting on the many communities, and the ecosystems, which depend on it.

The book won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Lonely Planet/ Stanfords Adventure Travel Book of the Year and the Prix Paul-Emile Victor.

His new book, Lone Wolf (Penguin, 2025), follows a thousand miles in the footsteps of a wolf who crossed the Alps, to become the first wolf back in the Italian Alps for more than a hundred years.

It is was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction. He has been named by the National Centre for Writing as one of ten writers shaping the UK's future. 

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