Video transcript
2019 NSW PRC author interview – Katherine Rundell

TAMARA ROGERS: Hi I'm Tamara Rogers from the Premier's Reading Challenge. We're here at the Riverside Theatre at Parramatta for the Sydney Writers Festival Primary Schools Day.

We're really excited to be bringing you some author interviews where we'll have the authors from the primary schools programme in conversation with some students from Galston High School. We really hope you enjoy hearing them have a chat about what they love about their work.

Thank you so much to the Sydney Writers Festival for having us along. We'd also like to thank the PRC programme sponsors, our media partner, News Local, and Dymocks Children's Charities, who are our supporting partner. We really appreciate all of their support for the programme.

MOMO BUNNY: OK. Hi, I'm Momo Bunny from Galston High School. I'm here today with the amazing Katherine Rundell. And she's written some great books, like these ones here. How are you?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: I'm very well, thank you so much. It's very lovely to be interviewed by you.

MOMO BUNNY: It's very lovely to be in your presence.

[laughing]

OK so, first question. Obviously as an author, you write a lot of books. So have you always enjoyed reading? What got you interested?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: I have. I think I've wanted to be a writer since I was five or six. Ever since I understood that books were made by people and they didn't sort of arise organically out of the ground like trees. And I've always loved stories. And I actually learned to read quite late. So I think it was just people telling me stories at first and, you know, memorising all the songs.

And then-- ever since then I've been writing like short stories, bad poetry, novels-- which I scrapped. And I think writing is one of those things which, if you love it, stays with you for your entire life. It can be one of those things that sustains you.

MOMO BUNNY: That's so sweet.

[laughing]

OK so, is there any specific author or book that inspires you?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: I think there are a lot of them. I guess an obvious one would be Philip Pullman's, his Dark Materials trilogy. I don't know if it's big in Australia, but it's huge in England. And it's this wonderful story. A sort of wild imagination in it. And when I was about 21, I met him at a dinner. And he very sweetly said, well, send me your book. So I did and he very kindly read it and he asked me to tea and he gave me all this advice.

And most of his advice was just, keep going. That most writing is just a question of persevering. Getting to the end, and then going back to edit. I think it was the best advice I've ever been given.

MOMO BUNNY: For any young aspiring authors out there, what advice would you give them?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: So the most obvious advice would be read. In the same way that you know, if you want to be a footballer you need to know what a footballer looks like. If you want to be a writer you need to know how books work. You need to know the structure. You need to know how you build an atmosphere. How you make people fall in love with characters. There are really simple tricks.

J.R. Tolkien knew that one of the ways to conjure atmosphere is to create a sense of losing something. So when he begins, you know, the elves are leaving Rivendell, you immediately have the sense of rich history even though it's just one sentence.

So I think that. Read, work out what other people are doing, and then yeah, you just need to get to the end so that you can begin again.

MOMO BUNNY: OK that's great. So you've written a lot of books. Do you think there's a specific character that you relate to the most?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: That's a wonderful question. My first book is probably one that gets read least. It's called The Girl Savage, in English, and Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, in American. And it's about a girl who grows up in Zimbabwe-- this quite wild life-- and then has to go to boarding school in England. And the character in that Wilhelmina, is based very loosely on my own childhood, and also on my best friends. So she's a sort of amalgamation of me and the people I loved.

And the thing that she has that I have is a kind of stubbornness and that she loves the things I love. She loves the wild. She loves big skies. She loves Zimbabwean song. And those are the things that sort of shaped me, I think.

MOMO BUNNY: So when you are writing a book, how do you get your ideas out? Is it like, do you have a specific way that you always stick to? Or is it just sort of like you get an idea and you quickly do something before you lose it?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: So it's a mixture of both. So I used to carry a notebook everywhere. Now, to be honest, I carry a phone. So I just use the notes application in that. You never know when a really vivid picture will come into your head for a scene and you have to write it down. Because you always think, that's such and idea, there's no way I'd forget it. You will. You will always forget it. So I write things down as they come.

But then I try to be quite disciplined about writing a certain amount of words today, because otherwise it's very easy just to let a week go by without doing anything. So I try to do about thousand words a day. Which is about two type pages of A4.

MOMO BUNNY: So I've heard it's very difficult to first get your books published. How long did it take and how old were you when you first got your book published?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: So it is, I think, usually so hard and so many people who are brilliant writers-- far better writers than I am-- spend years writing and rewriting. I happen to have a stroke of luck which is that, I got this fellowship at a college in Oxford. So I was 21 and I was made a fellow All Souls College in Oxford. And I was quite young for it and I think that made people interested in my book.

So I suddenly had an advantage. I had a bit of attention that I wouldn't otherwise have had. So for me, it actually happened very quickly. It was like a month. I wrote the book and then suddenly we had an offer. But that is not the norm. The norm is that really, really great writers can be waiting five or six or seven years. So if ever you decide to be a writer, and it takes a little bit longer than a month, that is no comment on the writing. That is just the norm. I was the weird anomaly.

MOMO BUNNY: Two of your books, The Wolf Wilder and Rooftoppers, are historical fiction. The Explorer is an adventure. So they're all set in different places across the world. Do you spend a lot of time researching?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: I do. It's one of my favourite things. So I love reading about the places. I love going to the places. So for The Explorer, which is set in the Amazon jungle, I went to the Amazon. And I swam with wild pink river dolphins. And I was taught how to catch tarantulas and piranhas for dinner.

And then for The Wolf Wild, I have a lot of Russian family so I went to St. Petersburg. And I went sledging in the Lyngen Alps to see what it would be like to be pulled on a sled. Because I knew I wanted to write a story where the girl is pulled by wolves.

And I spent a lot of time climbing rooftops. That's the sort of weird hobby I have, and that's how Rooftoppers began. So I possibly do more research then I really need to. I think some of my friends and colleagues who are also writing children's fiction are like, you have heard of the imagination, haven't you? You don't have to do everything that you put in your books. But for me, that's how I start to build the world. I go there. I write everything down. I take photographs and then I tried to conjure it up.

MOMO BUNNY: That's so exciting. It's like the best career ever.

KATHERINE RUNDELL: It is. The thing about it is you get to go anywhere in the world that you long to go and you get to tell everyone that it was for research for your book and not a holiday. It's very helpful.

[laughing]

MOMO BUNNY: OK so, how do you think your taste in books has evolved from when you were young and started reading books, to now as an author?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: That's a really wonderful question. I've never been asked that. Actually, a lot of the books that I loved when I was-- how old are you, 16?

MOMO BUNNY: Younger than that. I'm 13.

KATHERINE RUNDELL: You look very grown up. So a lot of the books that I loved when I was between the ages of about nine and 16, I still love wildly. Like, The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe. A brilliant writer called Diana Wynne Jones, who wrote a book called Howl's Moving Castle. Those books have stayed with me under my skin and I've never stopped loving them. But then as you get older, I think you start to fall in love with other things as well.

So like, when I was 13, I was not particularly interested in romance and now I love like, Anna Karenina, which is all about the terrible disasters that love can lead you to. So I think what happens is, rather than having discarded the stuff I loved when I was a kid, I have that and I have this stuff I love now. I think it's always an addition.

I think people who stop reading children's fiction when they're adults, or decide it's no longer important, are missing out on such a wild treasure trove of great books. I've actually written a little book about this big called, Why You Should Read Children's Books Even Though You Are So Old And Wise. Which is arguing that adults should also read children's books, that they're not just for children.

MOMO BUNNY: OK my last question is, so my favourite book of yours is Rooftoppers. I love Paris, it's like so nice and I find it so fun. Just like going along rooftops. But other people who are interested in reading your books, which book do you think they should read first?

KATHERINE RUNDELL: Oh, OK, I think if you are the kind of person who loves Paris, and the idea of being up high and having a sort of secret world, you should read Rooftoppers. If you are someone who loves fairy tales and wolves, you should read The Wolf Wilder.

If you love classic adventure stories, and the idea of being cast into the wilderness and having to discover who you are by having to stand on your own two feet, you should read The Explorer. And if you are the kind of person who wishes that they had grown up in Africa, sort of barefoot and having a life where you get to sort of ride among the zebras, bareback on a horse, then you should read The Girl Savage.

MOMO BUNNY: That was really good. Thank you so much for agreeing to interview. I loved it. No, really.

KATHERINE RUNDELL: Thank you. You're a brilliant interviewer.

MOMO BUNNY: Thank you. So that was Katherine Rundell.