Written by Roald Dahl, Danny, the Champion of the World is a 1975 children's book about an impoverished English boy who helps his father poach pheasants from a villainous wealthy landowner.
After his mother dies when he is four months old, Danny grows up with his father in a caravan behind their gas station and garage. Danny's childhood is happy as he learns from his father, a hard-working, kind, and imaginative man who spends much of his time telling stories to Danny. When Danny turns nine, he learns his father has always loved to steal pheasants from Mr. Hazell's private forest six miles down the road. Danny is shocked when his father reveals his grandfather was a notorious poacher who devised ingenious catching methods that exploited pheasants' taste for raisins. When Danny's father breaks his ankle in a trap dug in Hazell's Wood, he and Danny seek revenge by poaching most of Hazell's pheasants before his extravagant shooting party. Using Danny's idea of slipping sleeping pill powder into raisins, Danny and his father successfully gather 120 sleeping birds from the woods. However, the birds wake up and fly away before they can share them with townspeople. In the end, Mr. Hazell's shooting party is ruined and Danny and his father find that several of the birds have died from eating too many raisins. They celebrate by walking into town to buy an electric oven they can use to make roast pheasant.
Exploring themes of class antagonism, defiance, solidarity, deception, and inventiveness, Danny, the Champion of the World is a heartwarming depiction of a father and son bonding as they live out a Robin Hood–inspired fantasy of stealing from the rich and sharing their spoils with the poor.
Dahl based the children's book on his 1959 New Yorker short story "The Champion of the World," which features adults as the main characters and explores a similar premise. The 1989 television adaptation of the book starred Jeremy Irons and Robbie Coltrane.
