Portrait by\u00a0Karen Robinson<\/p>\n
Katherine Rundell, 38, was born in Kent but spent much of her childhood in Zimbabwe and Belgium. She became the youngest female fellow of All Soul\ufeffs College, Oxford, in 2008, and in 2011 published her first children\u2019s book, The Girl Savage. \ufeffAs well as catering for younger readers, Rundell has written nonfiction titles including Why You Should Read Children\u2019s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise (2019) and The Golden Mole\ufeff\ufeff (2022). Her biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne won the Baillie Gifford \ufeffprize in 2022; Rundell donated the prize money to ocean conservation and refugee charities. The first book in her award-winning children\u2019s series, Impossible Creatures \u2013 set in a fantastical parallel world called the Archipelago \u2013 was published in 2023. Rundell\u2019s new BBC Radio 4 series, A Carnival \ufeffof Animals, will air on weekday mornings in October\ufeff.<\/p>\n
You have just released the second instalment in the Impossible Creatures series, The Poisoned King. How many will you write?<\/p>\n
Originally, we sold three [to the publisher], but not with the sense that that would be the end. It will be a five-book arc. It has been, by many miles, the most satisfying and thrilling intellectual experience I\u2019ve had in my work.<\/p>\n
I always feel cheated in novels when plot holes are fixed by magic. How do you organi\ufeffse the constraints on your magical world?<\/p>\n
I established for myself a small number of immovable rules. For instance, impossible things can get you into trouble, but not out of it. There has to be a sense that the world requires nuance and intelligence and effort and endurance and care, because you will not get out of a problem in the real world without those things.<\/p>\n
Your experiences clambering about on Oxford rooftops at night informed Rooftoppers, and you \ufeffvisited the Amazon around the time of The Explorer. Did you learn any special skills for this series?<\/p>\n
It was mostly pre-existing experiences that I had. My main work for The Poisoned King would have been [thinking about] the interplay with Hamlet. In many ways, Anya [a princess whose \ufeffdad is framed for the murder of his own father] is a gender-flipped young Prince Hamlet. But the thing I really wanted very passionately \ufefffor this book was to \ufeffpresent a girl who is allowed her rage, whose sense that the world is unjust is not negated, and is allowed to be furious about it.<\/p>\n
That burning sense of injustice powers\u00a0this book.<\/p>\n
When you are a child, you are still discovering the great litany of injustices human culture has conjured up. You are still encountering all that is extraordinary, generous, intelligent and beautiful about us, but you are also discovering the ways we have betrayed each other on a vast, systematic scale, and at an individual scale. And so\ufeff I love the\u00a0idea of a children\u2019s book that can\u00a0say to a child: \ufeff\u201cYou are right to think this is wrong. You are right to be furious. Do not be lured into a sense that you are powerless.\ufeff\u201d<\/p>\n
I think, in adulthood, we know there are those whose vested interests are in making us think we are powerless, in making us thereby acquiesce and look away on things like corruption, or the ways in which climate change has been facilitated by industries and governments. It is worth telling children over and over: \u2018\ufeff\u201cIt is possible to be a force for change.\ufeff\u201d And it\u2019s also why, in my books, the children suffer, because I don\u2019t want children to think it\u2019s easy.\u00a0I want children to \ufeffpractise in their imagination the idea they will\u00a0need to be ready to endure boredom, but also calumny, confusion, misery.\u00a0And at the other side of it, on\u00a0the other side of\u00a0darkness, there lies great light.<\/p>\n
So many of our children are leading nature-depleted, risk-depleted lives. Can fiction plug that gap?<\/p>\n
It is the thing I am aiming for, and the thing I think great children\u2019s fiction can do. I am furious at the rate at which childhood has been so removed from the rights that a child should have: to safe space outside, where living things grow\ufeff; \ufeffto understand the world is a living, breathing thing, and therefore needs your protection. I think successive governments have failed over and over to protect [these spaces] for children. And, of course, we have also created a culture where there is less social allowance for the idea that children can take risks, and can be left to their own devices outside. The two together, I think, have diminished what a childhood experience should be.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re living at a time of great children\u2019s fiction, but there is also huge\u00a0competition for their attention.<\/p>\n
When I write, I do think about meeting children where they are. So I write with short chapters. I make sure there will be jokes. But I think we need to be\ufeff infinitely more furious at the ways in which a very small number of tech companies have suppressed their own research about the harm of things like social media on the developing brains of young people\ufeff \u2013\ufeff the way\ufeff \ufefftheir unprecedented wealth\ufeff has been used to lobby for very little control on those projects. And I think we need to be more blunt about the way young men and boys are being subjected to algorithmically\ufeff driven misogynistic propaganda.<\/p>\n
A survey \ufeff[\ufeffthe National Literacy Trust] brought out a few months ago said the number of children who read every day on their own, outside of school, has halved in the last 20 years. That probably does require us to think about how we can rise to meet that\ufeff. I do still believe there are very few children alive who cannot be enchanted with a story.<\/p>\n
Where does your own appetite for\u00a0wonder come from?<\/p>\n
One of the finest things I think humanity can offer is the ability to point out to one another things we might not have discovered ourselves, but which can shape the way we understand our lives. Where does that come from? I think partly through a young experience of death [Rundell\ufeff was 10 when her foster sister died, aged \ufeff16\ufeff], through an understanding that it is a brief and fragile thing to be a person\ufeff, \ufeffand a very difficult thing to be a person. I am not someone who finds anything easy. I have seen a lot of sorrow and horror. I do think, though, that looked at squarely and sharply and without idealism, humankind is breathtaking. And I would like to be one voice insisting that we do not forget that.<\/p>\n