“How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you?
I think surprises are the greatest pleasure of writing. It’s why I believe in the undersung value of allowing yourself – even commanding yourself – in a first draft to write badly, of not despairing at one’s own embarrassing beginnings: in the middle of it, surprises erupt.
What is the first thing you remember reading or having read to you?
I don’t think I know; but the first book I remember reading and obsessively loving was Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did; I was six or seven. I spelled my name Katy for years afterwards, in tribute.
Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?
I read this, by Foucault – from just before he died – and adored it: “Search for what is good and strong and beautiful … and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do”.
What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf?
I have a first edition of John Donne’s letters, which I was given when I was about twenty-three. It’s in very poor condition, but I treasure it hugely. I had been translating some Latin documents that a philosophy academic had bought in a great unseen bundle at auction, and in among them I found an unattested Philip Sidney sonnet, attributed to “SPS”. He gave me the Donne book as a thank you.
Have you ever regretted publishing something?
There are sentences in every book I’ve published that make me want to bite my own foot with horror.
Proust had madeleines. Which foods or meals trigger your memory?
Mazoe orange squash, which we begged for as children, when visiting my grandmother. It’s the colour of the middle traffic light. I am not convinced it has ever met an orange.
Have you had any notable experiences meeting authors you admire?
I was very lucky to know Hilary Mantel, a little. I once asked her, did you know, before you began, that you could do it: that something like A Place of Greater Safety or Wolf Hall was possible for you? And she said, yes. She knew she had to power and skill to do it. It was just a question of being disciplined enough to bring it out.
Do you have a favourite bookshop?
I love the Children’s Bookshop in Muswell Hill. They run young people’s book clubs – some so popular they have a year-long waiting list – they invite in babies and toddlers for free storytimes, and they’re at the beating heart of their local community.
How does distraction inform your writing?
It doesn’t. I don’t find my distraction valuable: I find it frightening. I have a block on my phone, so that it has no Google or Safari: I use it only for calls, messages and maps. I loathe the power of certain tech companies – headed by certain billionaires who have shown themselves sympathetic to authoritarianism – to bully and control our lives and our imagination.
What are you currently reading or watching?
At the moment, Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Born, and Lea Ypi’s new book Indignity: both brilliant. And, as part of adapting my books Impossible Creatures into a film for Disney, I’ve been re-watching just under a hundred family films in the past year. I came away with the sense that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is more terrifying than most classic horror, and Mary Poppins is one of the finest films ever made.
Who has influenced your writing?
There are so many: Pullman, Austen, Wodehouse, Diana Wynne Jones, Trollope, Dumas, Donne, Robert Louis Stevenson, C. S. Lewis, George Eliot, Richmal Crompton, Astrid Lindgren. It feels like one of the greatest strokes of luck of my life that the public library gave me access to that cornucopia of writers while I was still young. And poetry: my mother put poetry on the wall next to the bathroom sink throughout my childhood, to get the music of writing into our blood.
Which piece of music have you listened to the most in your life?
The opening of the Marriage of Figaro. It gives me such joy. And Miles Davis’s opening music for L’Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud: music like a starting pistol for the heart.
Do your ideas form themselves in your head or on the page?
Both, I think, in equal measure. The Soviet dissident writer Irina Ratushinskaya said of ideas, they come and go like cats. You have to catch them when they come. Once, out walking without my phone or a pen, I scratched a single word for a story idea into the leather of my shoe.
What is the worst job you ever had?
At twenty, I taught English to a frighteningly chic, brisk Italian woman. Her adult daughter wanted her to learn English, and had arranged the lessons in her home: the woman herself had no desire to speak a single word of it. We spent the sessions baking cakes in chic, brisk, total silence.
If you could choose any piece of art to hang above your desk, what would it be?
I just bought, with the first big cheque of my life, an edition of Bernard Sleigh’s “Anciente Mappe of Fairie-Land”: it has Thor, Puck, “Tom Thumb is somewhere here but he is too small to draw”. Sleigh made it during the First World War, as refuge from what he called “the hideous militarism of the time”.
What was your favourite text studied at school?
Hamlet. The play burned with fire for me. My most recent children’s book, The Poisoned King, is loosely based on it (very loosely, in that it has dragons).
Which font do you write in?
Times New Roman, 12 point. Sturdy.
What does a writing day look like for you?
It depends on where I am. A dream writing day would begin very early, and include swimming in the middle, and drinking with my partner at the end. But usually I’ll be at the British Library.
Which other art forms are necessary to your writing?
Painting. To look at, and to badly do.
Where do you seek refuge?
By the sea. In the sea. I’ve been stung by jellyfish many, many times: it doesn’t stop me finding the sea, in any weather, the finest place to be.
Katherine Rundell is the author, for adults, of Super-Infinite: The transformations of John Donne (2022) and The Golden Mole and Other Vanishing Treasure (2022) and for children, Impossible Creatures (2023) and its sequel The Poisoned King (September 2025).
The post Twenty Questions with Katherine Rundell appeared first on TLS.