Katherine Rundell considers herself to be someone who works “quite slowly”. Lord help the rest of us, then. At 36 she has written five adventure novels for children, plus an award-winning play and three books for adults, including a delightful compendium of animals, The Golden Mole, and her biography of John Donne, Super-Infinite, which she described as “an act of evangelism” for his poetry.
She was the youngest person to win the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction and the youngest female fellow at All Souls, Oxford’s most elevated college. In case you imagine her to be some cloistered academic, she has scaled Battersea Power Station, mastered the flying trapeze, flown a small plane and been arrested for protesting outside a nuclear weapons base. She gives every impression of being a woman who does six impossible things before breakfast — indeed, when we meet she confirms that she has been up since 5am working on a “secret” screenplay of a children’s classic.
