Katherine Rundell
| Katherine Rundell | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1987 Kent |
| Occupation | author, playwright, academic |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford |
| Notable works | Rooftoppers, Life According to Saki |
Katherine Rundell 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 (2011), 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, and The Wolf Wilder (2015).
Rundell 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 Newsweek's 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 (2005 – 2008). 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 Bookseller's 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.
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