Katherine Rundell


Katherine Rundell is an English author and academic. She is the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2014 won both the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, and Seriously....
Rundell's other books include The Girl Savage, released in 2014 in a slightly revised form as Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms in the United States where it was the winner of the 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction, The Wolf Wilder, and The Explorer, winner of the children's book prize at the 2017 Costa Book Awards.

Biography

Rundeli was born in Kent, England in 1987 and spent ten years in Harare, Zimbabwe, where her father was a diplomat. When she was 14 years old, her family moved to Brussels; Rundell later told Newsweeks Tim de Lisle that it was a culture shock, saying:
"In Zimbabwe, school ended every day at 1 o’clock. I didn’t wear shoes, and there was none of the teenage culture that exists in Europe. My friends and I were still climbing trees and having swimming competitions".
De Lisle notes, "She gives Belgium some credit for broadening her mind But she resented it too, to the point where all her books, and her play, contain a joke at Belgium’s expense".
She completed her undergraduate studies at St Catherine's College, Oxford. During this period she developed an interest in rooftop climbing, inspired by a 1937 book, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, about the adventures of undergraduate students at that university. Shortly after graduating, Rundell successfully applied to become a fellow in English Literature at All Souls College, Oxford. She told The Booksellers Anna James that the application process had involved a three-hour written examination on the single word 'novelty', adding that, "I wrote about Derridean deconstructionist theory and Christmas crackers I feel like they might have let me in despite rather than because of it". She subsequently completed a doctoral thesis on "the literary and textual afterlives" of the English metaphysical poet and cleric John Donne.

Writing career

Rundell's first book, published in 2011, was The Girl Savage; it told the story of Wilhelmina Silver, a girl from Zimbabwe, who is sent to an English boarding school following the death of her father. A slightly revised version was released in the United States in 2014, under the title Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, where it won the 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction.
Her second book, Rooftoppers, followed the adventures of Sophie, apparently orphaned in a shipwreck on her first birthday. Sophie later attempts to find her mother, whom she is convinced survived the disaster, whilst also taking to the rooftops of Paris in order to thwart officials trying to send her to a British orphanage. It won the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. Translated into French by Emmanuelle Ghez as Le ciel nous appartient for Les Grandes Personnes it was the winner of the 2015 Prix Sorcières Junior novels category.
Rundell's third novel, The Wolf Wilder, 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 play Life According to Saki, with David Paisley in the title role, won the 2016 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award and opened Off-Broadway in February 2017.
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. It won the 2017 Costa Book Award in the Children's Book category. Following the award, Rundell discussed the book's environmental themes and her research, which included eating tinned tarantulas, on BBC Radio 4's Front Row. It won the 2018 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award in the Food & Travel Book of the Year category.

Personal life

Rundell's hobbies include tightrope walking and roof walking, and she says she begins each day with a cartwheel because "reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless".

Publications