Katherine Rundell author page

Katherine Rundell biography

Katherine Rundell writes fiction for children, literary non-fiction and picture books. Rooftoppers won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and The Explorer won the Costa Children’s Book Award. She was a World Book Day author in 2021.

Rundell studied at the University of Oxford and became a Fellow of All Souls College. She is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where her academic work is on Renaissance literature. Her adult non-fiction includes Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize.

Her short essay Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise was published by Bloomsbury Publishing on 8 August 2019. In the essay, Rundell explores how children’s books can ignite and re-ignite the imagination, and how children’s fiction can create new perspectives on the world for adult readers.

Bloomsbury Children’s Books acquired a fantasy trilogy by Rundell in 2022. Impossible Creatures, the first book in the trilogy, was published in the UK and Ireland on 14 September 2023, and follows Christopher, Mal and a baby griffin in the Archipelago, a group of magical islands where mythic creatures live. Impossible Creatures was Waterstones Book of the Year 2023, and in 2024 Rundell was named British Book Awards Author of the Year and Impossible Creatures won Children’s Fiction Book of the Year.

Katherine Rundell teaching resources

• Bloomsbury’s Impossible Creatures World Book Day teacher kit is a 12-page PDF with a welcome letter, costume ideas, a quiz, paper-crown activity, bingo sheet, missing-crown scavenger hunt, creature-card templates, quiz answers and book-club notes.
• Bloomsbury’s Impossible Creatures educational resource pack is an 11-page PDF for ages 9+ covering English, Science, Geography, PSHE and Art and Design, with pre-reading tasks, cover questions, a character-profile activity for Mal, endangered-animal research and further activity ideas.
• Bloomsbury’s The Explorer teacher resource pack is a 19-page KS2 creative-writing PDF for ages 9-11, with sequential survival-themed lessons, warm-up activities, planning sheets, drafting tasks and a final writing outcome.
• Bloomsbury’s The Good Thieves teaching notes provide a 17-page KS2 PDF for Years 5 and 6, with four extracts, discussion questions and cross-curricular activities on lead characters, settings, relationships, creative writing and planning a heist.
• Bloomsbury’s Go on an Adventure with Katherine Rundell teaching pack is a 23-page multi-title PDF using Rooftoppers, The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer and The Good Thieves, with extracts, discussion questions, scrapbook tasks, map work, postcard writing, poetry and descriptive-writing activities.
• Authorfy’s Katherine Rundell masterclass page provides 28 videos, eight resource downloads and five extracts, including videos on Impossible Creatures, The Explorer and The Wolf Wilder, plus downloads for Impossible Creatures, The Poisoned King, The Wolf Wilder, The Good Thieves, The Explorer and a multi-title Katherine Rundell pack.