In 2008, at the age of 21, Katherine Rundell aced perhaps the most fiendish test in all of British academia: the entrance exam for All Souls College at Oxford University. For the final portion, a three-hour essay on a single word, “novelty,” Rundell managed to weave in references to both Derridean deconstructionism and Christmas crackers.
Dazzling the examiners with her erudition, Rundell was made All Souls’s youngest woman scholar ever, and given seven years to pursue a doctorate on John Donne’s poetry and the genealogy of style, tracing its impact on other poets. And so it was a cause of some befuddlement in the ancient halls of the college when Rundell announced to her adviser, Colin Burrow, that she also wanted to write children’s books.
“I knew that writing fiction for children is a serious and good thing to do,” recalled Burrow, a scholar of Renaissance literature who happens to be the son of the great English fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones, author of the Y.A. novel “Howl’s Moving Castle,” among other things. “Politely, that was not a view shared by all of my colleagues.”
But Rundell forged ahead. In the 16 years since, she’s produced more than a dozen works — children’s books, a play, and several books for adults — picking up a dizzying constellation of awards along the way. In 2022, she published “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” a general-audience spinoff of her thesis which makes a witty, erudite, joyful case for the continued relevance of Donne’s poetry; it won the 50,000 pound (or $66,000) Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.
The following year, she published “Impossible Creatures,” a fantasy novel for children, in Britain. An instant best seller, it was named Book of the Year by the country’s largest bookstore chain, Waterstones; Rundell herself was named author of the year at the British Book Awards. Reviewers compared her to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman.
Share
Print
