Katherine Rundell

British writer and academic, a fellow of All Souls College and best-selling author of numerous children’s novels, best known outside children’s fiction for her biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.

Rundell grew up in Zimbabwe, with a period of her teenage years in Brussels, and was made a fellow of All Souls at 21. She has written the children’s novels Rooftoppers and Skysteppers, both drawing on her own rooftop walking, and the short book Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Her academic work centres on John Donne, the 17th-century English poet and eventual Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, whom she has loved since being made to memorise his poetry as a child and on whom she wrote her doctoral thesis [?]; Super-Infinite was, in Tyler Cowen’s words introducing this episode, his favourite book of that year. She learned to fly small planes as an adult, following two grandfathers who flew Spitfires in the Second World War.

Core positions

Biography should extend the benefit of the doubt to a subject’s stated beliefs. Discussing whether Donne’s Anglican faith, adopted after a Catholic upbringing, was sincere or career-driven, Rundell argues for sincerity — citing newly dated letters showing Donne pursuing ordination even when easier, secular alternatives were on offer — rather than assuming self-interest explains conviction.
Children’s fiction is serious literature, not a lesser register. She argues children’s novels encode real ideals — that love, kindness, and equality will matter — presented as truths when they are really hopes, and that adults should read children’s books for that idealism rather than treating the genre as something to be outgrown.
Vocabulary difficulty is not the barrier writers assume it is. Her craft rule for children’s writing is pacing, not simplification: she will cut a hard word from a dramatic peak but otherwise argues children will guess, skip, or look up unfamiliar words rather than being put off by them.

In the wiki

Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words — conversation with Tyler Cowen on Donne’s religious sincerity, the ethics and politics of his suicide tract Biathanatos, T.S. Eliot’s partial misreading of Donne, and the case for adults reading children’s fiction