Katherine Rundell facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Katherine Rundell
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Rundell in 2020
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| Born | 10 July 1987 |
| Alma mater | St Catherine's College, Oxford All Souls College, Oxford |
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| Writing career | |
| Genre | Children's literaturen's fiction, non-fiction |
| Notable works | Rooftoppers (2013), Life According to Saki (2017), The Explorer (2017), Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (2022), Impossible Creatures (2023) |
| Notable awards | Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Costa Book Award Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction |
Katherine Rundell, born on July 10, 1987, is a talented English writer and a smart academic. She wrote Impossible Creatures, which was named the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2023. Her book Rooftoppers won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story in 2015. It was also considered for the Carnegie Medal.
Katherine is a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. She has also appeared as a guest expert on BBC Radio 4 shows like Start the Week and Private Passions.
Her other popular books include The Wolf Wilder (2015) and The Explorer (2017). The Explorer won the children's book prize at the Costa Book Awards in 2017. Her 2022 book, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, won the Baillie Gifford Prize. This made her the youngest person ever to win that award. In 2024, Katherine Rundell was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards.
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Katherine Rundell's Early Life
Katherine Rundell was born in Kent, England, on July 10, 1987. She spent ten years of her childhood in Harare, Zimbabwe, because her father was a diplomat there. When she was 14, her family moved to Brussels, where she went to the British School of Brussels.
Katherine once shared that moving to Brussels was a big change. In Zimbabwe, school ended early, and she didn't wear shoes. She and her friends spent their time climbing trees and swimming. She felt that Belgium helped her learn new things, but she also missed her old life. She even includes jokes about Belgium in her books and plays.
She studied at St Catherine's College, Oxford from 2005 to 2008. During this time, she became interested in climbing on rooftops. She was inspired by an old book from 1937 called The Night Climbers of Cambridge. This book was about students who explored rooftops at Cambridge University.
Katherine Rundell's Academic Career
After finishing her studies, Katherine Rundell became a fellow in English Literature at All Souls College, Oxford. She once explained that to get this position, she had to take a three-hour exam on just one word: "novelty." She wrote about complex ideas and even Christmas crackers!
Later, she completed her special research paper, called a doctoral thesis. It was titled "And I am re-begot': the textual afterlives of John Donne."
Katherine Rundell's Writing Journey
Katherine Rundell's first book, The Girl Savage, was published in 2011. It tells the story of Wilhelmina Silver, a girl from Zimbabwe. Wilhelmina is sent to an English boarding school after her father passes away. A slightly changed version of the book was released in the United States in 2014. It was called Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms and won an award in 2015.
Her second book, Rooftoppers, came out next. It follows the adventures of Sophie, who was thought to be an orphan after a shipwreck on her first birthday. Sophie believes her mother survived and tries to find her. She also explores the rooftops of Paris to avoid being sent to an orphanage. This book won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story. It was also nominated for the Carnegie Medal.
Katherine's third novel, The Wolf Wilder, tells the story of Feodora. Feodora helps prepare wolf cubs, which rich Russians keep as pets, to be released into the wild when they get too big.
Katherine Rundell also wrote a play called Life According to Saki. It won an award in 2016 and was performed in New York City in 2017.
Her fourth novel, The Explorer, is a survival story. It's about a group of children whose plane crashes in the Amazon rainforest. They discover a secret while trying to survive. This book won the Costa Book Award in the Children's Book category in 2017. Katherine talked about the book's environmental messages and her research, which included eating tinned tarantulas, on BBC Radio 4. It also won an Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award in 2018.
Katherine Rundell's fifth novel, The Good Thieves, is about a girl named Vita. She travels from England to New York with her mother to care for her sad grandfather.
In 2020, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2022, she published Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. This book won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2022. Many famous writers praised it. People say Katherine's writing style makes her biography of John Donne special and worth reading.
Katherine Rundell gave her Baillie Gifford prize money to charity. She donated to Blue Ventures, an organization that helps protect oceans, and to a charity that helps refugees. She explained her choice by quoting John Donne: "No man is an island."
Her most recent book, the fantasy adventure Impossible Creatures, won the British Book Award for Children's Fiction Book of the Year. It was also named the best book in England. In February 2024, it was announced that the Impossible Creatures series will have five books in total.
Katherine Rundell's Hobbies
Katherine Rundell enjoys tightrope walking and walking on rooftops. She says she starts each day with a cartwheel. She believes reading is like doing a cartwheel: "it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless."
