In 2022, as well as Super-Infinite, two other books by Rundell were published: The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure, a collection about the lives of some of the Earth’s most astounding animals, illustrated by Talya Baldwin, and children’s picture book The Zebra’s Great Escape, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie. Her 2013 children’s book Rooftoppers won the Waterstones children’s book prize and she won the Costa children’s book prize for the novel The Explorer. Rundell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where she works on Renaissance literature. Sanderson called Rundell’s writing “absolutely exquisite”, adding: “It’s interesting that Katherine Rundell is an award-winning children’s writer, because there’s a playfulness to her language and an ability to conjure up really concrete images, which I think is part of the craft of being an exceptional children’s writer.” Sanderson was joined on the judging panel by writer and science journalist Laura Spinney critic and writer for the Observer Rachel Cooke BBC journalist and presenter Clive Myrie author and New Yorker writer Samanth Subramanian and critic and broadcaster Georgina Godwin. And in so doing, she gives us a myriad reasons why poetry – why the arts – matter.” “Rundell makes an irresistible case for Donne’s work to be widely read 400 years later, for all the electric joy and love it expresses.

“Exquisitely rendered, its passion, playfulness and sparkling prose seduced all of us,” she said. Other music choices include Mozart, Bach, Strauss, Fauré and Miles Davis.Chair of judges Caroline Sanderson, said she and her fellow judges had unanimously agreed on Super-Infinite as the winner of the prize. She talks too about her love of tightrope-walking and roof-climbing, and about her passion for John Donne, choosing two musical settings of his work. Her own childhood was marked by the loss of her sister and she says it is no accident that she lost her sister when she herself was ten and that she writes for ten-year-olds now. Katherine Rundell tells Michael Berkeley that her books set out to explain to children that life does contain loss, and pain, and darkness, but that it is always possible to discover joy.

Her book on that great metaphysical poet, Super-infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, was published earlier this year, to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the poet’s birth.

Katherine herself is a roof climber and a tightrope walker.īorn in 1987, she grew up in Zimbabwe and Brussels after taking her undergraduate degree at Oxford, she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College where she wrote her PhD thesis on John Donne. Katherine Rundell started writing for children at the age of only 21 in little more than a decade she’s become one of our leading children’s writers, with six books so far, including the award-winning Rooftoppers, the story of a girl who travels across the rooftops of Paris looking for her mother.

Katherine rundell donne