Katherine Rundell is an English author and academic. She is particularly known for her novel Rooftoppers.
Background
Katherine Rundell was born on July 10, 1987, in Kent, United Kingdom. In her childhood, she wandered a lot because her father was a diplomat. She grew up in London and Zimbabwe. At age fourteen, she and her family moved to Brussels.
Her family has connections with Russia. Her grandfather married a half-Finnish, half-Russian woman, and her uncle’s partner is Russian.
Education
Katherine Rundell received a Bachelor of Arts degree at St Catherine's College, Oxford, in 2008. Then she completed a doctoral thesis on the literary and textual afterlives of the English metaphysical poet and cleric John Donne.
Career
After graduation, Katherine Rundell became a fellow in English Literature at All Souls College, Oxford, where she works on Renaissance literature. Сoncurrently she was writing her first novel The Girl Savage and published it in 2011. Her experiences of life in Zimbabwe and of leaving to move to Brussels when she was 14 had a strong influence on this novel. In 2013 Rundell wrote Rooftoppers, a novel influenced by her own hobby of clambering on Oxford’s college roofs.
She followed this with The Wolf Wilder, which tells the story of Feodora, who prepares wolf cubs - kept as status-symbol pets by wealthy Russians - for release into the wild when they become too large and unmanageable for their owners. Rundell's fourth novel, The Explorer, tells the survival story of a group of children whose plane crashes in the Amazon rainforest, and a secret they uncover. She is also the author of One Christmas Wish (2017) and Into the Jungle (2018), a sequel to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
In 2016 she wrote a play, Life According to Saki, as well. She worked on a short film about a tortoise Henry for Oculus Rift. She has been selected as one of the Aarhus39 - 39 of the leading children’s writers from across Europe - and one of the Hay30 writers and thinkers. Her recently published book is The Good Thieves (2019).
Views
Katherine Rundell finds writing the mother-daughter bond both fascinating and fascinatingly difficult. She loves writing food scenes.
Quotations:
"I think children are readers, unlike any other kind, in that they carry the books very close to their hearts. I think the books you read - especially when you're sort of 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 - they get under your skin. And there's this really fascinating thing that when you meet kids, they say how much they've loved your book, which is always lovely."
"Kids make books bigger. They do half the work. It's pretty remarkable."
"Books crowbar the world open for you - every book you read makes your imagination larger."
"I have wonderful parents, who encouraged me in everything I did – they kept my stories, and spoke to me about them, and that helped enormously."
"Only weak thinkers do not love the sky."
"Never ignore a possible."
"It's dancing! It's magical, actually. A kind of slowish magic. Like writing with your feet."
Personality
Katherine Rundell loves research: she loves the idea of a picture coming into clarity. She also watches a lot of documentaries; she thinks quite visually, and it helps her to see the world in motion.
Rundell’s been a nerd, a looker-upper of things all her life – she read a lot of books about the place: historical accounts, diaries, textbooks, fiction. She read a lot of Russian novels - she’s always been a little bit in love with Tolstoy. And she’d read most of War and Peace - although she’d skipped all the war bits - so she went back and read the war bits. And she read a lot of Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. All these books give her the sense of a place where people are very close to their country; where they believe that passion comes from the nation. Rundell's favorite book is Emma by Jane Austen.
Rundell has always been in love with wolves. She likes the idea that we’re all a little bit wild animal: animals who can love, and do mathematics.
Quotes from others about the person
"A writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination." - Philip Pullman
"An ultra-stylish writer with a true gift for imaginative storytelling." - Jacqueline Wilson
"I think it takes a certain kind of writer who can make the ordinary seem extraordinary with a few sentences and capture your imagination and encourage you if only for a little while, to see the world in a slightly different way than you'd normally do. And Ms. Rundell's definitely that kind of writer."