But now I can see it isn’t an accident that I write books for children who are around the same age as I was when my sister died.’ ‘If you’d asked me when I was 21 why I was writing for children, I would have said it was because of the fiction I had loved as a child, especially the kind that bites onto your ankles and won’t let go. Her early desire to write children’s fiction was spurred (or so she thought) by the influence of that voracious childhood reading. Petite and sprite-like, Rundell is a delightful, thoughtful, and giving interviewee, with the slight otherworldliness of someone who spends a lot of time curled up in her own imagination. ‘After her death my parents were very preoccupied, so I spent a huge amount of time on my own, reading.’ ‘She got sick when I was nine and died when I was ten,’ Rundell tells me when we meet in London on a winter’s afternoon. But this idyllic upbringing was poleaxed by the death of her older foster sister. While she learned to read fairly late, she completed her first novel, Sally’s Surprise, at the age of eight, as a birthday gift for her father, and sewed a cover for it in blue silk that she embroidered with stars. She ran barefoot and dodged imaginary crocodiles in rivers. So it was for Katherine Rundell, multi-award writer of fiction for children, and of nonfiction for adults.īorn in the UK in 1987, she spent her childhood in Zimbabwe, and it was a time of unbridled freedom. For certain writers, it is a significant event, often in early life, that dictates their creative path.
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