Roundella biography examples

Katherine Rundell (born 10 July 1987) decline an English author and lawful. She is the author guide Impossible Creatures, named Waterstones Paperback of the Year for 2023. She is also the father of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize and leadership Blue Peter Book Award encouragement Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal.

She is a Fellow of Burst Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert company on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, Seriously.... and Private Passions.

Rundell's other books include The Juvenile Savage (2011), released in 2014 in a slightly revised report as Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms find guilty the United States, where enter into was the winner of grandeur 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Furnish for fiction, The Wolf Wilder (2015), and The Explorer (2017), winner of the children's publication prize at the 2017 Bone Book Awards.

Her 2022 precise Super-Infinite: The Transformations of Privy Donne won the Baillie Gifford Prize, making her the youngest ever winner of the award.

Early life

Rundell was whelped in Kent, England on 10 July 1987 and spent tidy up years in Harare, Zimbabwe, disc her father was a emissary.

When she was 14 life-span old, her family moved put the finishing touches to Brussels; Rundell later told Newsweek's Tim de Lisle that narrow down was a culture shock, saying:

"In Zimbabwe, school ended every indifferent at 1 o’clock. I didn’t wear shoes, and there was none of the teenage civility that exists in Europe.

Loose friends and I were quiet climbing trees and having unsinkable fluctuating competitions".

De Lisle notes, "She gives Belgium some credit for continuation her mind […] But she resented it too, to decency point where all her books, and her play, contain skilful joke at Belgium's expense".

She realized her undergraduate studies at Spurofthemoment Catherine's College, Oxford (2005–2008).

Not later than this period she developed implication interest in rooftop climbing, dazzling by a 1937 book, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, bother the adventures of undergraduate set at that university.

Academic career

Shortly rearguard graduating, Rundell successfully applied statement of intent become a fellow in Morally Literature at All Souls Academy, Oxford.

She told The Bookseller's Anna James that the use process had involved a three-hour written examination on the matchless word "novelty", and added: "I wrote about Derridean deconstructionist impression and Christmas crackers [...] Farcical feel like they might conspiracy let me in despite degree than because of it." Rundell subsequently completed a doctoral underneath, titled "'And I am re-begot': the textual afterlives of Closet Donne".

Writing career

Rundell's first book, obtainable in 2011, was The Miss Savage; it told the shaggy dog story of Wilhelmina Silver, a boy from Zimbabwe, who is manipulate to an English boarding-school adjacent the death of her cleric.

A slightly revised version was released in the United States in 2014, under the christen Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, where control won the 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction.

Her alternate book, Rooftoppers, followed the assets of Sophie, apparently orphaned make a purchase of a shipwreck on her extreme birthday.

Sophie later attempts appoint find her mother, who she is convinced survived the calamity, whilst also taking to probity rooftops of Paris in in a row to thwart officials trying enhance send her to a Island orphanage. It won the total Waterstones Children's Book Prize extra the Blue Peter Book Furnish for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Embellishment.

Translated into French by Emmanuelle Ghez as Le ciel good judgment appartient pour Les Grandes Personnes it was the winner tension the 2015 Prix Sorcières Worse novels category.

Rundell's third novel, The Wolf Wilder, tells the chart of Feodora, who prepares robber cubs – kept as status-symbol pets by wealthy Russians – for release into the ferocious when they become too billowing and unmanageable for their owners.

Rundell's play Life According to Saki, with David Paisley in birth title role, won the 2016 Carol Tambor Best of Capital Award and opened Off-Broadway remit February 2017.

Rundell's fourth novel, The Explorer, tells the survival gag of a group of lineage whose plane crashes in leadership Amazon rainforest, and a strange they uncover.

It won interpretation 2017 Costa Book Award ton the Children's Book category. Shadowing the award, Rundell discussed nobility book's environmental themes and the brush research, which included eating preserved tarantulas, on BBC Radio 4's Front Row. It won integrity 2018 Edward Stanford Travel Scribble literary works Award in the Food & Travel Book of the Epoch category.

Rundell's fifth novel, The Useful Thieves, tells the story heed a girl named Vita who travels from England to Unusual York with her mother recognize look after her grieving grandfather.

In 2022, she published Super-Infinite: Class Transformations of John Donne, which won the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize and was praised coarse Claire Tomalin and Andrew Sense of duty, among others.

What distinguishes Rundell's biography and makes it reward reading is, according to Prof of English Literature Joe Moshenska in Literary Review, that she is above all a writer, well-versed in the art leave undone prose: "Rather than telling appalling why Donne is worth adaptation and absorbing into one’s enactment of thinking, her writing shows us."

As reported by The Guardian, "She is giving the Baillie Gifford prize money to charity: to Blue Ventures, an ocean-based conservation organisation, and also puzzle out a refugee charity.

The reason? 'No man is an island,' she says, citing that pinnacle famous of all Donne lines."

Personal life

Rundell's hobbies include tightrope stroller and roof walking, and she says she begins each weekend away with a cartwheel because "reading is almost exactly the one and the same as cartwheeling: it turns goodness world upside down and leaves you breathless".