Her book on that great metaphysical poet, Super-infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, was published earlier this year, to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the poet’s birth. Katherine herself is a roof climber and a tightrope walker.īorn in 1987, she grew up in Zimbabwe and Brussels after taking her undergraduate degree at Oxford, she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College where she wrote her PhD thesis on John Donne. She has written for, among others, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times: mostly about books, though sometimes about night climbing, tightrope walking, and animals.Katherine Rundell started writing for children at the age of only 21 in little more than a decade she’s become one of our leading children’s writers, with six books so far, including the award-winning Rooftoppers, the story of a girl who travels across the rooftops of Paris looking for her mother. Rundell is also the author of a book for adults, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards.

Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. See where 1601 fits on our Timeline About Katherine Rundell Momento: John Donne’s Commonplace book People/Social John Donne marries the 17 year old Anne and is thrown in the Fleet prison by her father, amid ice-cold winds and lice The first performance of Hamlet - which Donne would, perhaps, as a great attender of plays, have gone to see John Donne composes rakish poetry as a man about town - including almost certainly “Love’s Growth” - and attends bear baiting That’s why she has written a sparkling new biography of the poet: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. And in the view of our guest today, Katherine Rundell, Donne should be considered alongside William Shakespeare as one of the finest wordsmiths this country has ever produced. However Donne’s poetry isn’t defeatist – he was famous in his time for his unusual, intelligent and imaginative work, which used fleas to talk about sex and violence to talk about God. In particular, the tragic death of his younger brother who, aged just nineteen, was thrown into prison for hiding a Jesuit priest and subsequently caught the plague. Born into a grand Catholic family who had suffered persecution under Protestant monarchs, he was intimately acquainted with the cruelty of sixteenth-century England. John Donne led many lives, from a young rake in his early years to archdeacon of St Paul’s in his old age.

We visit playhouses, bear-fighting pits and the poet’s marital bed to better understand Donne’s life and work. This week we head back to Renaissance England to immerse ourselves in the world of John Donne, one of Britain’s most ingenious poets.

Katherine rundell donne