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• Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures (Katherine Rundell ; with illustrations by Talya Baldwin) - 2024 Doubleday, New York, NY
• The Zebra's Great Escape (Katherine Rundell ; illustrated by Sara Ogilvie) - 2024 Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, New York, NY
• The Poisoned King (Katherine Rundell ; with art by Ashley Mackenzie) - 2025 Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY

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  Katherine Rundell

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Katherine Rundell

  Rundell in 2020
  Born 10 July 1987 (age 38)
  Pembury, England
  Alma mater St Catherine's College, Oxford
  All Souls College, Oxford
  Occupations
  Authorplaywrightacademic
  Writing career
  Genre Children's fiction, non-fiction
  Notable works Rooftoppers (2013),
  Life According to Saki (2017),
  The Explorer (2017),
  Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (2022),
  Impossible Creatures (2023)
  Notable awards Boston Globe–Horn Book Award
  Costa Book Award
  Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
  Katherine Rundell (born 10 July 1987) is an English author and academic. She is the author of Impossible Creatures, named Waterstones Book of the Year for 2023.[1] She is also the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize[2] and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story,[3] and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.[4] She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford[5] and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week,[6] Poetry Please,[7] Seriously....[8] and Private Passions.[9]

  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,[10] The Wolf Wilder (2015), and The Explorer (2017), winner of the children's book prize at the 2017 Costa Book Awards.[11] Her 2022 book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne won the Baillie Gifford Prize, making her the youngest ever winner of the award.[12] In 2024, Rundell was named author of the year at the British Book Awards.[13]

  Early life

  Author photograph of Katherine Rundell by Nina Subin
  Rundell was born in Kent,[14] England on 10 July 1987[15] and spent ten years in Harare, Zimbabwe, where her father was a diplomat.[4] When she was 14 years old, her family moved to Brussels, where she attended the British School of Brussels.[16] 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".[17]

  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".[17]

  She completed her undergraduate studies at St Catherine's College, Oxford (2005–2008). During this period she developed an interest in rooftop climbing,[18] inspired by a 1937 book, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, about the adventures of undergraduate students at that university.[17]

  Academic career
  Shortly after graduating, Rundell secured an examination fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.[5] She told The Bookseller's Anna James that the examination process had included a three-hour written paper on the single word "novelty", and added: "I wrote about Derridean deconstructionist theory and Christmas crackers [...] I feel like they might have let me in despite rather than because of it."[14] Rundell subsequently completed a doctoral thesis, titled "'And I am re-begot': the textual afterlives of John Donne".[19]

  Writing career
  Rundell's first book, published in 2011, was The Girl Savage; it told the story of Wilhelmina Silver, a girl from Zimbabwe, who is sent to an English boarding-school following the death of her father. A slightly revised version was released in the United States in 2014, under the title Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, where it won the 2015 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction.[10]

  Her second book, Rooftoppers, followed the adventures of Sophie, apparently orphaned in a shipwreck on her first birthday. Sophie later attempts to find her mother, who she is convinced survived the disaster, whilst also taking to the rooftops of Paris in order to thwart officials trying to send her to a British orphanage. It won the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize[2] and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story,[3] and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.[4] Translated into French by Emmanuelle Ghez as Le ciel nous appartient pour Les Grandes Personnes[20] it was the winner of the 2015 Prix Sorcières Junior novels category.[21]

  Rundell's third novel, The Wolf Wilder, tells the story of Feodora, who prepares wolf cubs – kept as status-symbol pets by wealthy Russians – for release into the wild when they become too large and unmanageable for their owners.[14]

  Rundell's play Life According to Saki, with David Paisley in the title role,[22] won the 2016 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award[23] and opened Off-Broadway in February 2017.[17]

  Rundell's fourth novel, The Explorer, tells the survival story of a group of children whose plane crashes in the Amazon rainforest, and a secret they uncover. It won the 2017 Costa Book Award in the Children's Book category.[24] Following the award, Rundell discussed the book's environmental themes and her research, which included eating tinned tarantulas, on BBC Radio 4's Front Row.[25] It won the 2018 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award in the Food & Travel Book of the Year category.[26]

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

  She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.[27]

  In 2022, she published Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which won the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize[28][29] and was praised by Claire Tomalin and Andrew Motion, among others.[30] What distinguishes Rundell's biography and makes it worth reading is, according to Professor of English Literature Joe Moshenska in Literary Review, that she is above all a writer, well-versed in the art of prose: "Rather than telling us why Donne is worth reading and absorbing into one’s way of thinking, her writing shows us."[31]

  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 to a refugee charity. The reason? 'No man is an island,' she says, citing that most famous of all Donne lines."[12]

  Rundell's latest release, fantasy adventure Impossible Creatures, was awarded the British Book Award Children's Fiction Book of the Year and best book in England.[32] In February 2024, it was confirmed that the Impossible Creatures series will include five books in total.[33] In October 2025, Walt Disney Studios acquired the rights to adapt Impossible Creatures into a live-action film series to be produced by Walt Disney Pictures.[34]

  Personal life
  Rundell's hobbies include tightrope walking and roof walking. [4]

  Publications
  —— (2011). The Girl Savage. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571254316.
  —— (2013). Rooftoppers. Illustrated by Terry Fan. London: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. ISBN 9781442490581.
  —— (2014). Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms. Illustrated by Melissa Castrillon. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. ISBN 9781442490628.
  —— (2015). The Wolf Wilder. Illustrated by Gelrev Ongbico. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781408862582.
  —— (2017). The Explorer. Illustrated by Hannah Horn. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781408854877.
  —— (2017). One Christmas Wish. Illustrated by Emily Sutton. London: Bloomsbury Children's Books. ISBN 9781408885734.
  —— (2018). Into the Jungle: Stories for Mowgli. Illustrated by Kristjana S. Williams. London: Macmillan Children’s Books. ISBN 9781536205275.
  —— (2019). The Good Thieves. Illustrated by Matt Saunders. London: Bloomsbury Children's Books. ISBN 9781408854891.
  —— (2019). Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781526610072.
  —— (2022). Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571345922.
  —— (2022). The Zebra's Great Escape. London: Bloomsbury Children's Books. ISBN 9781526652263.
  —— (2022). The Golden Mole. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571362493.
  —— (2023). Impossible Creatures. London: Bloomsbury Children's Books. ISBN 9781408897416.[35]
  —— (2025). The Poisoned King. New York: Knopf. ISBN 9780593809907.

• RCW Literary Agency - https://www.rcwlitagency.com/authors/rundell-katherine/

  Katherine Rundell

  © Nina Subin
  Katherine Rundell is a multi-million-bestselling author whose novels for children have won the Waterstones Book of the Year, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children’s Book Award, among many others. In 2024 she was named the British Book Awards Author of the Year, and Impossible Creatures won the Children’s Fiction Book of the Year. She is a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and her books for adults include Super-Infinite, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize. Very occasionally she goes climbing across the rooftops of Oxford, late at night.

  Instagram: @katherine.rundell

  Books in order of publication:

  Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (2011)

  Rooftoppers (2013)

  The Wolf Wilder (2015)

  The Explorer (2017)

  One Christmas Wish (2017)

  Into the Jungle (2018)

  The Good Thieves (2019)

  Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise (2019)

  The Book of Hopes (2020)

  Skysteppers (2021)

  Super-Infinite (2022)

  The Zebra's Great Escape (2022)

  The Golden Mole (2022)

  Impossible Creatures (2023)

  The Poisoned King (2025)

  Agent: Claire Wilson

• The Horn Book - https://www.hbook.com/story/katherine-rundell-talks-with-roger-2025

  Katherine Rundell Talks with Roger
  by Roger Sutton
  Aug 08, 2025 | Filed in Authors & Illustrators

  Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book. To receive Notes, sign up here.

  Sponsored by

  Picking up where Impossible Creatures left things in the Archipelago, The Poisoned King brings back young Englishman Christopher but also introduces Anya, Princess of an Archipelagian kingdom, who finds her inheritance (not to mention her father) in serious trouble.

  Roger Sutton: You seem to be doing your part to rescue mythical creatures from what Rachel Kushner has called “cultural exhaustion.” I’m very curious to know where the creatures come from in your imagination — obviously they come from folklore and history, but what are they doing in your head? How did they get there?

  Katherine Rundell: I was fascinated by mythical creatures as a kid, for the thrill of them and for the atmosphere of delicious possibility and for the danger of them. But then later it seemed to me that they have an extraordinary range of possibilities for talking about the human imagination and about the world around humans. If you think about it, some of them we straightforwardly invented as a way of scaring children, as a way of reining in, as a form of discipline, almost. There are others that we invented as a way of thinking about delight or desire or ecstasy. And there are others that we invented as a genuinely well-informed misunderstanding. Adrienne Mayor, who’s a sort of “paleo-historian,” suggests that things such as dinosaurs, such as a T-rex, might have looked like enormous devastating birds, and that might be where the thunderbird of South America comes from. So, just the idea that a mythical creature can be a brilliant way of talking about very fundamental human experiences, about dread, love, hunger, passion, power, joy, protection. But also they are things we have truly believed in. We did actually believe in unicorns. We did actually believe in griffins.

  RS: How did these creatures appear in what you read?

  KR: As a child I would seek out books that had creatures. So, for instance, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I always loved the fauns. And in Tolkien I adored the trees, the Ents. Tolkien famously said that he created his Ents because he was so disappointed by the denouement of Macbeth, when Birnam Wood “moves” to Dunsinane. He thought that was incredibly underwhelming. So he instead created a world in which the trees could truly uproot and march. And the physical weight, the realness, of these mythical creatures, rendered that weight to the mythical worlds that I was reading. And then also books such as The Last Unicorn and of course I read Harry Potter and I adored Diana Wynne Jones. Diana Wynne Jones has these sort of sideways gestures toward mythical creatures. In The Pinhoe Egg there’s a horse who turns out to be a hidden unicorn. And then there’s a wonderful older book called The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge in which Maria Merryweather spies a beautiful white horse across a moonlit landscape. She assumes that it is a horse, and it turns out to have been a unicorn. I guess they are a way to enchant the atmosphere.

  RS: And what was your actual environment as a young reader?

  KR: I lived in London for most of my early childhood and then we moved to Zimbabwe where I lived until I was fourteen, and then I moved to Belgium just for four years. All of my books have a joke about Belgium in them. Belgium, of course, is a marvelous country in many ways but a hard thing to accept when you had previously been in Zimbabwe. Always quite urban spaces in which beauty was always present even if it was the sort of ramshackle beauty of South London, of Camberwell, where I lived. A lot of Camberwell is not classically beautiful. It’s not a rich neighborhood. But there are old buildings in amongst the McDonald’s and the drugstores. There are always jags of unexpected beauty throughout London.

  RS: If I recall correctly from the Q&A we did about Impossible Creatures, you knew this was a series from the start, right?

  KR: Oh yes, absolutely, yes. I always knew that it would be a world that I wanted to stay in and invite children back into over and over again. Because I think there is a huge amount to be said for offering children a mixture of the familiar and the new. So you get the shock of discovery but also the feeling of renewal, of rediscovery, of being able to re-enter a world you’ve adored. For me the Narnia books were sort of the cornerstone of my childhood. They’re all very different. And in every single one you get a totally different iteration of Narnia.

  RS: There’s lively disagreement over whether the Narnia books should be read in chronological order or in order of their publication. Which do you think is the first one?

  KR: Oh well, if I was making children read them, I would suggest starting with Lion, Witch. I love The Magician’s Nephew. I think it’s underrated. But for that kind of sweep, a book that will grab you by the wrist and not let go, I do think Lion, Witch takes precedence. How about you? What would you start with?

  RS: Oh, the same. Maybe that's because that's the first one I read. But, you know, I can't shake that feeling whenever I open a closet, of wanting to push the coats to the side and see how far I’m going to get.

  KR: Of course. And I think every child has it. As a child, I was very clear on the gap between fiction and reality. I absolutely understood it. And still, in every new closet that I encountered, I would push the coats aside, just to check. Just in case.

  RS: You never know. I thought it was interesting that in this book you start with the hero of the first book, getting him into the invented world, and then you forget about him for about ninety pages. How did you decide to do it that way? You could have alternated stories. There are many different ways you could have dealt with the quests of these two children. But you take the character everybody knows and then you say, “Okay, forget about him. Let’s talk about Anya, the princess.”

  KR: In part it’s because I know that Anya is going to be so important in the ongoing series. And as well, I wanted every single book to have its own distinctive taste, much like Narnia. With this series, Impossible Creatures, there will always be things that you would gain by reading them in the order in which they will be published, because that will be a sequential order within the story unfolding. But I also want each and every one to be totally distinctive and totally itself and its own microcosmic story within a wider arc, and this really is Anya’s story. Christopher is a crucial figure in it, and he has his own quest and his own passion and his own need to save the ancient dragons. But it is mostly a story about a girl being asked to rise to a situation she never dreamed could have happened. You know, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” I wanted her to be, in some ways, a Shakespearean hero. And for that I felt she needed to get the full sweep of center stage, at least at the beginning of her story. And then, of course, when Christopher and Anya reconnect, they discover the ways in which their twin missions are in fact deeply intertwined.

  RS: And will that continue in a third book?

  KR: Oh, certainly. In book three we see both Christopher and Anya as absolutely key to that story.

  RS: How far along are you in book three?

  KR: I’ve written several drafts, and the aim is hopefully to bring it out next autumn. But that will, of course, depend on many things.

  RS: Do you find it daunting to project a series?

  KR: I would have thought I would have. And I absolutely don’t. I find it the greatest and most exciting imaginative project of my career. It has been such a thrill to know that I can go back and back. There will be five books in total. And I know exactly where we will be with each. I know the great denouement. I know what will happen to every character. And the pleasure of getting them there and making sure that on the way there, they offer us visions of the reality of the world and also good jokes and adventure, that feels to me like a really rich delight.

  RS: How do you balance the humor with the terrible things that happen in both books? How do you keep the balance of the brutally terrible and the hilarious?

  KR: It seems to me that children need good jokes. A good joke is a great way of showing someone that you care for them. It’s a kind of intelligence and a kind of saluting of their intelligence. And I think you can bring children through really complex emotional and intellectual questions if you lead them there with strong jokes. Jokes can be both a Trojan Horse and a set of stars and maps. They can be a profound good in a story. And I think we can also trust children to be able to accept and metabolize quite a lot of big emotions — grief, fear. There’s an inclination that we all have to protect children. But I think it’s probably better to arm them rather than protect them. To give them the tools that they will need in the years ahead, because the world that our children will inhabit will be harder than the one that we inhabit. I think we need to offer them a sense of the value of intellectual endeavor, of tenacity, of love, of care, of focus. We need to offer them a glamorous vision of these things, because there are many people offering them a glamorous vision of wealth, of the will to dominate, of being a billionaire in a shiny world. We need to offer them something bolder and stronger and better.

  RS: When you say that, it sounds like you have kind of an agenda for what we need to teach children, but you don’t write that way at all.

  KR: I would say that what a writer can do is give children the capacity for empathy, sensibility, nuance, and the rhythm of stepping into someone else’s imagination. That seems to me one of the great things that literature can do. But I also don’t want to lay down dogmatic rules for living, in part because I don’t think those really exist. I think there are too many various forms of a good life to offer them a vision of just one. But I also think it’s poor form to offer kids an enormous adventure and then feed them a moral. I do think books have a morality to them, but I want children first of all, when they read a book of mine, to be experiencing adventure and a sense of the variousness and vividness of the human heart.

  RS: Are you conscious of being a writer for children? Or do you think of yourself just as a writer?

  KR: It's an old answer, but I think it is also true of me: I write for myself as a child and I write for myself right now. So the things that I want to happen, the things that would give me a thrill, and also the things that I desperately wish I could have offered my ten-, eleven-, fourteen-year-old self. I am writing therefore, yes, for adults and for children. And my favorite children's books, things like the Moomin books and The Golden Compass and Pippi Longstocking and A Wizard of Earthsea, they have a sense in them both of needs that are most vivid when you are a child, for raucousness, for chaos, for a sense of high jinks and a kind of tearaway humor. But also, the things that we need most as adults, if you think of the bone-deep profundity of the Moomins or Earthsea, there are books that trust you to find the meaning that they have offered you.

  RS: For kids who love to read (at least for this kid who loved to read!), there's a permeability not only between what they read and the real world but between this one book they read and this other book that they read, so that you get a really marvelous sort of fog of literature.

  KR: Yeah, absolutely, and making children into readers seems to me one of the great tasks of anyone who wants to participate in a civilization they believe in. To make children into readers is to allow them to enter that space in which all the books they read essentially enter this sort of huge atrium of their imagination and live there like birds. And they don’t really necessarily exist in neat rows. I don’t think a child’s imagination is like a library; it is much more like a kind of wild menagerie, and those books exist and collide. Frequently, as a kid, I would mix up different characters and different books. They were in a constant state of a kind of engine within my imagination. They weren’t static and they weren’t even that precise, but they were the life-giving force of my childhood. That, and of course our family and those we adore and the outside, the natural world, those were the things that shaped my experience of being a child. And it’s why I have become — as I know you are and so many of the people who read The Horn Book are — so anxious about the falling reading-for-pleasure rates and so eager to do everything we can to reverse that rate, because it seems to me that it is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet for childhood happiness. That doesn’t exist, but if there were one after health and prosperity, reading would be the thing that would offer children as much protection as possible against the trials that will inevitably come to them.

  RS: Are you hopeful for the future of reading?

  KR: Absolutely. I do still believe wildly in the future of books. I truly do. Because what is a book but the way of rescuing human imagination from the ravages of time, a way of catching the very finest of human thought, of one human's beating heart, and handing it down over potentially infinite time?

  RS: Mm-hmm. Like your mythical creatures have survived.

  KR: Yes, yes, thousands of years.

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Katherine Rundell
  (b.1987)

  Katherine Rundell was born in 1987 and grew up in Africa and Europe. In 2008 she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her first book, The Girl Savage, was born of her love of Zimbabwe and her own childhood there; her second, Rooftoppers, was inspired by summers working in Paris and by night-time trespassing on the rooftops of All Souls. She is currently working on her doctorate alongside an adult novel.

  Awards: Libbys (2025), Nibbies (2024), Waterstones (2023), Costa (2017) see all

  Genres: Young Adult Fiction, Children's Fiction

  Series
  Impossible Creatures
  1. Impossible Creatures (2023)
  2. The Poisoned King (2025)
  thumbthumb

  Novels
  Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (2011)
  aka The Girl Savage
  Rooftoppers (2013)
  The Wolf Wilder (2015)
  The Explorer (2017)
  One Christmas Wish (2017)
  The Good Thieves (2019)
  The Zebra's Great Escape (2022)
  thumbthumbthumbthumb
  thumbthumbthumb

  Collections
  Into the Jungle (2018)
  thumb

  Anthologies edited
  The Book of Hopes (2020)
  thumb

  Series contributed to
  World Book Day 2021
  Skysteppers (2021)
  thumb

  Non fiction hide
  Superinfinite (2022)
  The Golden Mole (2022)
  Vanishing Treasures (2024)
  thumbthumbthumb

  Omnibus editions hide
  Katherine Rundell Collection 4 Books Set (2020)

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/13/author-katherine-rundell-donates-royalties-to-climate-charities-in-trump-protest

  This article is more than 11 months old
  Author Katherine Rundell donates royalties to climate charities in Trump protest
  This article is more than 11 months old
  Royalties earned from The Golden Mole, published in the US this week as Vanishing Treasures, will be given towards counteracting ‘the election of a climate-change denier’

  Ella Creamer
  Wed 13 Nov 2024 11.51 EST
  Share
  British author Katherine Rundell will give all the royalties from one of her books to climate charities in response to the re-election of Donald Trump.

  The author of bestsellers for children and adults has said she will donate 100% of author royalties earned from sales of The Golden Mole, her 2022 book on endangered species, “in perpetuity”. The book was published in the US on Tuesday under the title Vanishing Treasures. So far she said she has donated more than £10,000, and hopes it could eventually be much more.

  The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell.
  The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell. Photograph: Faber
  “The election of a climate-change denier to the US presidency is a catastrophe for all of us,” said Rundell. “It comes at a time when the planet has never more urgently needed our protection.

  “It has rarely been so tempting for anyone who cares about the fate of the living world – of the Earth itself, of the parliament of the non-human, of the terrible human suffering that climate chaos will bring – to despair. But it’s much too urgent and important for despair.”

  Rundell plans to split the royalties across different organisations, which will change every five years. The initial recipients are “two relatively small charities whose work I admire colossally”, said the author. They are Blue Ventures, which helps rebuild fisheries and restore ocean life, and Forest Peoples Programme, which supports the rights of communities living in forests.

  “Protecting forests is often a deadly risk for Indigenous peoples and local communities,” said Rundell, drawing attention to the 207 environmental defenders killed in 2017. “I am so grateful that these groups are there, fighting for the planet, and the people most at risk.”

  The author has previously donated to Blue Ventures – when she won the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize in 2022 for her book Super-Infinite, a biography of the poet John Donne, she donated half her winnings to the conservation charity, and half to Sea-Watch, which conducts rescues of migrants in the Mediterranean.

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  ‘He has a burning originality’ … Rundell, who once wrote a book in a month.Photo by Linda Nylind. 18/11/2022.
  ‘Taking life advice from John Donne would be disastrous’ – the roof-walking, trapeze-flying Baillie Gifford winner
  Read more

  Royalties from all the editions of The Golden Mole published in different countries will be donated. “In the scheme of things, it’s very small – but I want my book to be a tiny part of the urgent fight ahead of us,” said the author.

  Rundell has written many books for children, including Impossible Creatures, which was named Waterstones book of the year in 2023, and The Explorer, winner of the 2017 Costa children’s book award. She is also a fellow St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

  Trump’s re-election is expected to result in the US leaving the Paris climate agreement, “something of grave, grave concern” to climate-vulnerable countries, Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr Pa’olelei Luteru, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, told the Guardian today. “Our survival is very much at risk,” he added.

  Trump has called climate change “a big hoax” and “one of the great scams of all time”; he used the mantra “drill, baby drill!” repeatedly during his campaign. Analysis suggests that his agenda could add billions of tonnes to US emissions.

  “I think it is going to be a hard, bleak fight ahead of us,” Rundell said. “But the time to give up is never.”

• Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/09/10/katherine-rundell-impossible-creatures-interview/

  Katherine Rundell is her generation’s J.R.R. Tolkien
  Rundell wants her readers to love dragons — and John Donne — as much as she does.

  September 10, 2024
  More than
  1 year ago
  7 min

  17

  By Sophia Nguyen

  Katherine Rundell. (Nina Subin)
  LONDON — Dragons never go out of style; so naturally, one of them arcs across the cover of Katherine Rundell’s “Impossible Creatures,” wings unfurled for maximum glory. That seems to have done the trick: The novel, newly available in the States, was an instant bestseller when it came out in Britain last year. It would be easy to overlook the little guy at the bottom left of the illustration — a baby griffin named Gelifen. He is the last of his kind and the true heart of Rundell’s story, in which two kids, Mal and Christopher, must save a magic realm from environmental catastrophe. Griffins are “joy birds,” a scientist tells them. “Cornucopial life admirers.”

  That also describes Rundell, a fellow at St. Catherine’s College at Oxford and the latest in that university’s celebrated tradition of scholar-fantasists — C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman. She is a high-spirited evangelist for her various passions (in no particular order: children’s fiction, Renaissance literature and the natural world). Her first book for adults, “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise,” from 2019, was an essay-length retort to the colleagues who claimed that her talents were wasted on the genre. “I felt that that was so shortsighted, so ludicrous,” she said, when we met over the summer. “A really great children’s book can hook a child. It can put a fish hook through their imagination and root them in the world of books for the rest of their lives.”

  Next came “Super-Infinite,” a fleet study of the poet John Donne that was widely admired for not only its intellect but also its forthright enthusiasm. Rundell will follow it in November with an essay collection, “Vanishing Treasures,” paying tribute to various animal species. (A typical Rundellian declaration: “I did not believe in love at first sight; but I have found there’s an exception, and that is the pangolin.”) Opening one of her books is like seeing a missionary on your doorstep — chatty, bright-eyed, zealous. Somehow, Rundell makes you want to invite her in for tea.

  We met by London’s Borough Market — not far, she noted, from where crowds thronged to hear Donne preach and where, in her early years of city life, she would take walks along the Thames, so she could be someplace “reliably open to the sky.”

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  Rundell spent her formative years in wild spaces. At age 7, she moved to Zimbabwe, where her mother had family and her father worked as a diplomat, paying the young Rundell 50 pence for every poem she memorized (and extra if it came from the Renaissance). “My childhood was bedecked with the mad beauty of the living world,” she said. “Just growing up in a space where you could be alongside things that grew and lived that weren’t human, and weren’t human-made — or really, human-cultivated.”

  That experience, along with her family’s rage-inducing move to Brussels (where “all the birds look like they’re going to a funeral”), inspired her first novel, published in the United States as “Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms,” about a girl growing up on an African farm who is sent to an English boarding school. Rundell wrote the draft in a mad rush, in the month or so between her 21st birthday and starting a new job. Back then she didn’t know what it was to live in the adult world, “but I did know what it was to be a child. This would be a place where I would feel on not just firm ground, but on ground which felt to me very, very alive.” That first draft was bad — in retrospect, because she had tried cramming in every idea she ever had — but it gave her a taste for the work.

  Her second book, “Rooftoppers,” about a secret world above the buildings of Paris, made her realize she wanted to spend the rest of her life writing for children: “There was something about the imperatives for clarity and boldness that I just adored.” She also felt compelled to speak to them about life’s sorrows, because of an early experience of grief: the death of her foster sister when Rundell was 10. “I have always wanted to offer children a sense that — it would be a lie to say that everything is fine. Everything is not fine. But despite the pain that you will not be able to swerve — I do not know when it will come, but it will come — the beauty, and the astonishment, the generosity, the care, the love, is also real. It makes it worth all of your endurance.”

  (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
  All of Rundell’s fiction has to please both her young self and her adult self, she said. The young self loves descriptions of food and elaborate contraptions, lots of jokes, and adventures “without overmuch adult interference.” (Her next three novels featured resourceful, clever protagonists who raise wolf cubs, travel the Amazon river and cross the ocean to New York.) The adult self prizes complexity “and an acknowledgment of the little angry rat that lives inside the human heart.”

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  But it isn’t easy to tell where one self ends and the other begins. Rundell found some of the imaginary animals that populate “Impossible Creatures” in old manuscripts, while researching for her academic lectures: “Sometimes you would find, in the corners, doodles of chimeric figures, maybe a manticore.” The plot even has a Donne connection, though Rundell jokes about hiding this fact from her youngest readers: specifically, an unfinished epic poem in which the soul of a tree in Eden gets reincarnated into various forms. (In a turn that may not surprise adult readers, Mal discovers she’s the vessel for her world’s eternal soul.)

  The first draft of “Impossible Creatures” was overstuffed, and Rundell took pains to shave the manuscript down. There had to be enough detail to make the story shine, and enough left out so that the reader’s imagination could fill in the rest. The greatest children’s books pull off this balancing act, per Rundell: To this day, she can recount, exactingly and with absolute confidence, the hair color of the Pevensies of Narnia, “but they are never described in the book.” Only by leaving enough space in the book can children feel comfortable inhabiting it, making it their own.

  Rundell knew she had succeeded when, at public appearances, readers would come up to talk to her. They were usually around 11 or 12; they might have a younger sibling they were discussing the story with. They knew, of course, none of “Impossible Creatures” was real. But they wanted to ask, just to check. Just in case.

  “I confess, I am fairly brutal,” she said. In reply, she tells them: The world is imagined. The creatures were imagined by people hundreds and thousands of years before me. But they tell us something about ourselves. And our creatures are just as extraordinary. Rundell hopes “to teach them the wonder muscle — so that wonder can be directed at the very real astonishments of this world.”

• Deadline - https://deadline.com/2025/10/disney-impossible-creatures-movie-author-katherine-rundell-1236572053/

  Disney Bets Big On ‘Impossible Creatures’ & Its Oxford Prof Author Katherine Rundell

  By Mike Fleming Jr

  Mike Fleming Jr
  Co-Editor-in-Chief, Film

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  “Impossible Creatures” by Katherine Rundell
  “Impossible Creatures” by Katherine Rundell
  Courtesy
  In a deal worth a substantial seven figures, Walt Disney Studios won an auction to acquire rights to Impossible Creatures, the fantasy series by acclaimed British author Katherine Rundell. She will adapt the first two books in the series into screenplays.

  Impossible Creatures has become a publishing phenomenon on the order of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Twilight Saga. Two of the five planned books have been published; Impossible Creatures was published in 2023, and the second installment, The Poisoned King, just debuted. Rundell just became the first UK children’s author since J.K. Rowling to simultaneously reach the No. 1 position on the children’s book charts in both the UK and the U.S. Her books so far have sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, and in 2024 she was awarded both Author of the Year and Children’s Book of the Year at The British Book Awards. Rundell signed two seven-figure publishing deals with Bloomsbury and Knopf. What she originally planned as a trilogy has become a five-novel saga, and Rundell plans to broaden the franchise with spinoffs and prequel books.

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  These heady numbers on a global scale made Impossible Creatures a must-have Hollywood property, with visions of youth-appeal movies, merchandise and maybe theme park attractions dancing in the heads of studios looking for new IP. The thirtysomething author, a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford and Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, has been courted by studios and producers since she let it know that after the release of the second book, she was ready to make a deal.

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  I’m told the finalists were Disney, Warner Bros and Netflix, and execs from all three headed to London this summer to lay out their vision. For Disney, the driver behind the deal was David Greenbaum, President of Disney Live Action and 20th Century Studios, along with Disney Live Action president Daria Cercek and Allison Erlikhman, SVP Production, Disney Live Action, and Disney Head of Literary Affairs Clare Reeth. Along with Literary Affairs Director Emily Dayton, Reeth championed the book early. Watching keenly from afar were Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman.

  Disney came away with a deal that leaves the studio not only staked in the five-book series but also Rundell and her creative partner Charles Collier; their Impossible Films is run out of London by a team that includes Paddington 2 and Wonka producer Alexandra Derbyshire, and former Pixar CFO and Fox President of Studio Operations Simon Bax. Rundell will have a first-look deal with Disney that includes all of her current and upcoming lit properties.

  You don’t see Disney going all in like this on many properties, but this comes in an effort to move the live-action menu beyond transfers of animated films – even though Lilo & Stitch so far has been the only Hollywood film to gross north of $1 billion. Greenbaum and 20th Century Studios President Steve Asbell put this kind of work into courting Bruce Springsteen and manager Jon Landau to broker a screen rights deal for the Warren Zanes book that became the upcoming Oscar-season release Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.

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  Whereas Asbell is a Jersey guy who told me at the New York Film Festival premiere party he was still tingling after asking The Boss his best moment at the Asbury Park haunt The Stone Pony while they shot there, and seeing Springsteen point to the bar and say that right there, he met Patti Scialfa (she would join the E Street Band as a singer, but more importantly, she married Springsteen). Here, it was Greenbaum’s turn to bond with Rundell. After all, she was a prof at the college where Greenbaum went to grad school, earning a degree at Oxford.

  So what exactly got the studio so hot and bothered?

  The series takes place in the world of Gilmouria Archipelago. Christopher is a human boy who stumbles into the hidden entrance to the magical world while spending the holiday with his grandfather in the Scottish Highlands. He soon meets Mal, a girl from this hidden world of magical creatures, and together they attempt to save the creatures that are suffering from a decline in the magical force that keeps them alive and vibrant.

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  “When I read Impossible Creatures, I knew it belonged here at Disney,” said Iger in a statement. “I was immediately drawn into the vibrant world Katherine imagined and the possibilities of what we could do together with this story. Written by Katherine herself, these movies are in the best of hands with our Walt Disney Studios team, and I can’t wait to see this tale brought to the screen.”

  Said Disney’s Bergman and Greenbaum: “Katherine Rundell has masterfully crafted a spectacular and immersive world with Impossible Creatures and her vision is a perfect match for the Disney storytelling tradition.” We are thrilled to collaborate with Katherine and Charles to bring this epic saga to life for audiences worldwide—it’s going to be an extraordinary adventure.”

  Who can know what happens to fantasy world creators when they taste the riches of franchise success – few saw the plot twist where Harry Potter author Rowling would use her notoriety to take toxic and polarizing transphobic positions – Oxford prof Rundell seems a good one to bet on. Disney is all-in with an author whose work has been hailed critically for its cracking dialogue, and she will be hands on in the architecture of what Disney hopes will be a franchise universe.

  Katherine Rundell
  Courtesy Disney
  “I’m absolutely thrilled to be linking arms with Disney,” the author said in a statement. “It’s a privilege to be writing these screenplays and developing these first movies in the franchise together with Charles, my team at Impossible Films, and with the exceptional team at Disney. I’m especially grateful to Bob Iger, whose enthusiasm after reading the book helped set this collaboration in motion, and to Alan Bergman and David Greenbaum for being incredible partners throughout this process. Our ambition is to build Glimouria and Impossible Creatures into a spectacular series of films, so that we can entertain and inspire family audiences across the world.”

  The deal was brokered by Collier via Chalcot Square Arts and Media Management on behalf of Rundell, directly with the Walt Disney Pictures team led by Greenbaum, Kal Walthers, Paige Olson and Bill Neuschaefer. Rundell is represented by Chalcot Square and RCW.

Rundell, Katherine IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES Knopf (Children's None) $19.99 9, 10 ISBN: 9780593809860

Two young people save the world and all the magic in it in this series opener.

When tall, dark-haired, white-skinned Christopher Forrester goes to stay with his grandfather in Scotland, he ventures to the top of a forbidden hill and discovers astonishing magical creatures. His grandfather explains that Christopher's family are guardians of the "way through" to the Archipelago, where the Glimourie Tree grows--the source of glimourie, or the world's magic. Black-haired, olive-skinned Mal Arvorian, a girl from the Archipelago, is being pursued by a murderer, and she asks Christopher for help, launching them both on a wild, dangerous journey to discover why the glimourie is disappearing and how to stop it. Together with a part-nereid woman, a ratatoska, a dragon, and a Berserker, they face an odyssey of dangerous tasks to find the Immortal, the only one who can reverse the draining of magic. Like Lyra and Will from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Mal and Christopher sacrifice their innocence for experience, meeting every challenge with depthless courage until they finally reach the maze at the heart of it all. Rundell throws myriad obstacles in her characters' way, but she gives them tools both tangible (a casapasaran, which always points the way home, and the glamry blade, which cuts through anything) and intangible (the desire "to protect something worth protecting" and an "insistence that the world is worth loving"). Final art not seen.

An epic fantasy with timeless themes and unforgettable characters. (map, bestiary) (Fantasy. 10-16)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Rundell, Katherine: IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332828/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a9cacdb8. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES, by Katherine Rundell. Illustrated by Ashley Mackenzie.

Katherine Rundell, a fellow of St. Catherine's College at Oxford, belongs to that university's longstanding tradition of combining scholarship -- her biography of John Donne, ''Super-Infinite,'' won the Baillie Gifford Prize -- with writing beloved children's fiction. ''Impossible Creatures,'' Rundell's sixth novel for middle grade readers, became an instant best seller in her native Britain when it was published last year and has garnered numerous awards, including the Waterstones Book of the Year.

The novel begins as Christopher Forrester is packed off to stay at his grandfather's estate at the foot of a steep hill in Scotland, little realizing that the hill contains a portal to a magically sequestered portion of the world called the Archipelago, islands inhabited by creatures from assorted mythologies. In a parallel story, Mal Arvorian, a girl born in the Archipelago and able to fly thanks to an enchanted coat, investigates signs that the islands' magic, or glimourie, is fading. This endangers all the unicorns, mermaids, kankos and other fabulous creatures -- including her pet, a baby griffin -- who need glimourie to survive. Mal enlists Christopher in a journey to find the source of the diminishment. Soon, their party expands to include a surly ship's captain, an oceanographer and a talking horned squirrel who serves as navigator.

The first book in a series, ''Impossible Creatures'' marks a departure for Rundell. Her previous novels have their fanciful elements, but this is her first work of fantasy. Oxford's history of producing illustrious children's fantasy authors has prompted comparisons of Rundell to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman, but fantasy doesn't feel like a natural fit for her. Rundell's true antecedent is Robert Louis Stevenson, another author of thrilling yarns presented in confident, richly colored yet sleek prose.

In Rundell's ''The Explorer,'' children survive a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest by building a raft and learning how to eat tarantulas. The heroine of the sublime ''Rooftoppers'' discovers a secret community of orphans living on the rooftops of Paris, including a boy who never sets foot on the streets and makes a waterproof tent out of pigeon feathers. In ''The Good Thieves,'' a professional pickpocket and two circus performers help a girl burgle the mansion of a mobbed-up robber baron in Prohibition-era New York.

Such doings may be improbable, but they're not impossible, and much of the delight to be found in Rundell's novels comes from the ingenuity and resourcefulness of her child characters when faced with the daunting constraints of reality. ''Children have been underestimated for hundreds of years,'' an old woman argues in ''Impossible Creatures,'' articulating a common theme in Rundell's work. Another is the stifling demands of decorum, especially when imposed on Rundell's wild, tomboy girls. Mal's great-aunt and guardian (like many of Rundell's protagonists, she's an orphan) forbids ''an immense, book-length list of things,'' prohibitions Mal routinely defies. Christopher's father (his mother is dead) is afraid of almost everything.

These complaints barely register before the plot of ''Impossible Creatures'' kicks into gear with a hired killer forcing Mal from her home and Christopher plunging through a passage in a lake and into the Archipelago. All this happens so hastily that the wonder of Rundell's premise never has a chance to fully bloom.

Rundell -- no doubt correctly grasping that action, not awe, is her strong suit -- wastes no time in delivering her characters into a violent struggle, a chase scene and a daring escape. She keeps Christopher and Mal on the move: fighting off monsters, petitioning the Archipelago's magical authorities for help and pursuing a series of fetch quests involving dragons, centaurs and an island populated entirely by convicted murderers, with the mission of liberating the Archipelago from the sinister ''master'' who sent that hit man after Mal.

In adventure mode, Rundell is well nigh irresistible, and the child readers for whom this book is intended will surely fall hard for it, as they have for her earlier novels. Adult readers, however, may notice the haphazard thinness of her world-building compared with that of those other Oxfordian fantasists. ''Impossible Creatures'' contains many borrowed motifs: The Archipelago strongly resembles Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, and the crew's journey from one themed island to another recalls Lewis's ''The Voyage of the Dawn Treader''; Mal has an enchanted compass to guide her like the alethiometer in Pullman's ''His Dark Materials'' trilogy; the notion of a villain draining the magic from the world brings to mind ''The Lord of the Rings.''

But none of that truly matters because all great fantasy writers dip from a shared well. What compels them is a longing for some other place, deeply imagined and in opposition to the mundane world we inhabit. Where Rundell differs is that she doesn't seem to find the real world lacking in wonders or marvels or challenges to whet the desire of her valiant child heroes. Her stories are most fun when you can believe they might really happen, that we don't need to seek elsewhere for meaning or adventure. Rundell may vacation in the land of make-believe, but this world is her true home.

IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES | By Katherine Rundell | (Ages 10 and up) | Knopf | 368 pp. | $19.99

Laura Miller is a books and culture columnist for Slate and the author of ''The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia.''

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PHOTO: Cover illustration for ''Impossible Creatures.'' This article appeared in print on page BR18.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Miller, Laura. "The Fantasy Novel That Flew Off Britain's Shelves." The New York Times Book Review, 25 Aug. 2024, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A805944371/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c13c68c3. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

Rundell, Katherine VANISHING TREASURES Doubleday (NonFiction None) $26.00 11, 12 ISBN: 9780385550826

Literature, folklore, history, and science inform these profiles of 22 endangered species.

The award-winning author of young adult books and a superb biography of John Donne turns her sharp literary style and wit to endangered animals in this brisk, eye-opening, thoroughly entertaining book. Animals who exhibit "everlasting flight, a self-galvanizing heart and a baby who learns names in the womb" may seem like inventions, she writes, but the natural world is "so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the surface." Meet the speedy swift, the American wood frog, and the dolphin. Early on, Rundell reminds us that we've lost "more than half of all wild things that lived." The quick Australian wombat, one of poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti's favorite pets, is "one of the rarest land mammals in the world." It's possible that some rarely seen, slow, half-blind Greenland sharks are more than 500 years old. She's furious that America has refused to designate the giraffe as an endangered species, even though its numbers have dropped 40% in 30 years. She relishes the strength of the coconut hermit crab, named after the hard-shelled fruit it can crack open, whose intricate group interactions "make the politics of Renaissance courts look simplistic." Of the eight species of bear, six are at risk or endangered, and "the number of hares in Britain has declined by 80 percent in the last century." Storks, conversely, are a "true success story of back-from-the-brink." Other animals she regards with reverence and concern for their future are seahorses (the majority of their species could be gone by 2050), pangolins ("the world's only rainbow mammal...currently the most trafficked animals in the world"), and the blind, iridescent golden mole, which can hear ants and beetles crawling aboveground. Young and old will savor Rundell's infectious enthusiasm for these remarkable and infinitely varied creatures.

A clarion call for preservation by way of a delightful bestiary.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Rundell, Katherine: VANISHING TREASURES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865132/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1b753f93. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

* Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures. By Katherine Rundell. Nov. 2024. 224p. illus. Doubleday, $26 (9780385550826); e-book (9780385550833). 591.68.

Rundell's latest (after the middle-grade fantasy Impossible Creatures, 2024) is a gem of a book, a bestiary of animals that are slowly disappearing due to habitat loss and climate change. She covers everything from the raccoon, crow, and spider to the Greenland Shark, the narwhal, the golden mole, and finally, the human. Each entry is full of descriptions of each animal's remarkable features and fun facts (the wombat can outrun Usain Bolt, young swift chicks prepare for flight by doing "feathery push-ups" in the nest) as well as historic human encounters (a girl whose crow friends brought her gifts, Pliny the Elder's adorable assumptions about how hedgehogs collect food). Rundell's wit fascinates and cuts as she describes characteristics of these fascinating creatures (on the coconut hermit crab, "too large to fit in a bathtub, exactly the right size for a nightmare") and chides humans for their threatening behavior (she sarcastically encourages giraffe-skin collecting, "if you felt like externalizing the apocalyptic whiff of your personality"). This magical collection of very real animals will charm and inspire readers. As Rundell says in her introduction, "The time to fight, with all our ingenuity and tenacity, and love and fury, is now."

YA/S: Conservation-minded YAs will be inspired by this magical blend of history, animal facts, and charming writing. SM.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Maguire, Susan. "Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 5-6, Nov. 2024, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829739694/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0cc5980d. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary

Endangered Creatures

Katherine Rundell

Penguin Random House, 2024, 224 pages

Illuminated manuscripts of real and imaginary animals, known as bestiaries, were a popular way of sharing the wonders of the world during the Middle Ages. Sometimes authors used descriptions and illustrations of animals to provide moral and theological instruction; some relished the foibles of the animal kingdom. While intending to introduce species to the Western world, some scribes took great liberties with their depictions that are unexpectedly humorous.

As medieval illuminators tried in their day, Katherine Rundell attempts to create a bestiary of the modern era in Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures. But instead of showing the vastness of man's knowledge, Rundell explores how little we truly know about the animals in our world, whether common, like the hare, or rarer, like the narwhal.

In twenty-three short essays, each one dedicated to a different endangered creature or animal with an endangered sub-species, Rundell expounds on the history and biology of animals as diverse as rodents, canines, felines, fish, birds, and even arthropods. Each essay explores how humans tend to get the animal world wrong for example, it was once widely believed that storks and other birds wintered on the moon.

The truth, Rundell argues, is sometimes as fantastical as our misunderstandings: In 1822, a stork showed up in Germany with a spear in its neck. That spear came from central Africa, where the birds overwinter after a remarkable journey of thousands of miles.

"Every scientist you meet will tell you: there is no reason to believe that we haven't got just as much wrong today as we have done in every generation up till now," she writes in the book's introduction. Several centuries down the road, humans may laugh at our present-day explanations for animal phenomena just as we do at bestiaries of old.

Rundell shows us through many such examples that our understanding of animals is constantly evolving. For instance, sixteenth-century English farmers believed that hedgehogs stole milk from their cows at night, which resulted in an enormous cull of the spiny mammals. We've since learned they are lactose intolerant milk can be fatal to them.

In another example, Rundell notes that people used to believe narwhal tusks were unicorn horns that could detect poison, kill spiders, and cure health ailments. We now know better. But despite all our technology and scientific research, we remain clueless about the real purpose of the narwhal's tusk. Is the tooth for fighting, hunting, or courtship purposes, or a combination thereof?

Rundell points out that our lack of scientific knowledge about animals is a serious handicap to our ability to protect them. Take the venerable Greenland shark, which can live for centuries. (There's speculation that there are sharks alive today that were contemporaneous with William Shakespeare). Despite their longevity, we do not know much about these creatures; we have never seen them mate or give birth. Rundell says, "Their invisibility to us means that we do not know how endangered they are."

Using the bestiary format, readers get a wide swath of animals across the world, from common day animals to rarer ones, each with its own special history and intelligence.

While Rundell writes elegiac entries on animals across the planet, she ends each chapter with a sort of meditation on the animal and its place in our world (or rather our place in theirs). But sometimes her end-of-chapter conclusions feel rushed. For instance, in her chapter on lemurs, who face threats from poverty-induced hunting, among other things, Rundell explains that conservation has to work for the people who live with the animal. It's an important point, and a key conservation challenge, which she does not develop further.

Throughout the rest of the book, Rundell talks about how humans are depleting the natural world for wealth, fame and the desire to collect rare species. She mentions the devastation of the exotic animal trade on animal populations, but she only really gives the role of poverty a passing glance. It's not often that a reviewer wishes the book were longer, but Vanishing Treasures could have gone even deeper so that these crucial ideas do not seem like passing thoughts.

Overall, the book convincingly reminds us about our fellow animals, and the cost of letting them fade away. It may be the most monumental task we've ever faced, but Rundell aptly reminds us, "Hope active, purposeful, informed hope is what we owe to the world. A body of unimaginable splendor turns on its axis, calling us to its aid."

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Earth Island Institute
http://www.earthisland.org/
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Shoenberger, Elisa. "Unknown Knowns." Earth Island Journal, vol. 40, no. 2, summer 2025, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A844822149/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3a209810. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

Rundell, Katherine THE POISONED KING Knopf (Children's None) $15.99 9, 11 ISBN: 9780593809907

Following the events ofImpossible Creatures (2024), a devoted Guardian teams up with a brave princess to fight her power-hungry uncle and save the Archipelago's dragons from a strange new threat.

Jacques the dragon summons Christopher Forrester back to the Archipelago from the human world: Dragons are dying, and no one knows why. Meanwhile, on the island of Dousha, Princess Anya's grandfather, King Halam, has been murdered, and her father accused--though she knows he's innocent. When Christopher and Anya take refuge on the islet of Glimt, the Berserker Nighthand helps them see how their twin missions to save the dragons and free Anya's father are connected. They work together to create an antidote for the poison that's killing the dragons and to keep Anya and her father safe from her murderous uncle. Meanwhile, Nighthand and Irian, the part-nereid ocean scholar, pursue their own important secret mission. Divided into three parts--"Castle," "Dragons," and "Revenge"--and containing elements of fairy tales, fantasy, and Shakespeare, this story continues the storyline established in the series opener, yet because it introduces new characters and obstacles, it could also stand alone. Dark-blond Anya ("five feet tall and all of it claws") is a match for white-presenting Christopher, who, though he still misses Mal, finds that "it made a difference to have someone to move through the world with again. A friend changed the feel of the universe." Mackenzie's delicate, otherworldly art adorns the text.

A spectacular return to a magical world. (map, bestiary)(Fantasy. 10-15)

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"Rundell, Katherine: THE POISONED KING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A845697197/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a0f29270. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

"Rundell, Katherine: IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332828/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a9cacdb8. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025. Miller, Laura. "The Fantasy Novel That Flew Off Britain's Shelves." The New York Times Book Review, 25 Aug. 2024, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A805944371/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c13c68c3. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025. "Rundell, Katherine: VANISHING TREASURES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865132/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1b753f93. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025. Maguire, Susan. "Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 5-6, Nov. 2024, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829739694/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0cc5980d. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025. Shoenberger, Elisa. "Unknown Knowns." Earth Island Journal, vol. 40, no. 2, summer 2025, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A844822149/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3a209810. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025. "Rundell, Katherine: THE POISONED KING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A845697197/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a0f29270. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

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