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[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
My name is Katherine Rundle and I'm the author of some non-fiction books for adults, like Super Infinite, which is a book about John Donne.

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But most of all, the Impossible Creatures series, uh, and The Poison King, the second in the series.

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I think a fantasy is one of many. I think for me it is the one I have always loved most.

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And I say in my talk, I think fantasy is philosophy's more gorgeously painted cousin.

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It is a way of thinking about huge questions that are at the centre of the human heart,

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and one of the ways we can do it with fantasy is to offer bright landscapes,

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bright images, things that will get under the skin and be metabolised by the human heart latch themselves onto our consciousness.

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And so I think often I do not think fantasy is the best form of literature.

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I think there is no such thing as a best form of literature. For me, it is often one of the most vivid.

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I think it is. Absolutely. It is not only a joy, but also probably to ignore the long history of fantasy would be to ignore such a wealth.

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Things from Gilgamesh thousands of years ago, the morte d'Arthur, Beowulf, the fairy Queen, and then of course,

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more recent iterations of those imaginations, things like, you know, of course, Lewis and Tolkien, but also Alan Garner, Susan Cooper.

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And to think about also ways that we have imagined fantasy in, in Shakespeare, um, The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream.

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And to go all the way back to our great epic imaginings of huge landscapes and huge fears and things like the Odyssey,

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I think that one of the great joys of writing fantasy is that you can look back over

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thousands of years of the ways that we have thought about what it is to be a person,

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and the possibilities of being a person in the world. Well, that's a great question.

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What am I reading at the moment? Uh, well, I'm currently reading Wilkie Collins's book, uh, The Woman in White, which is the first time I read it.

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It's not quite fantasy, but it has elements of gestures towards the supernatural.

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There are absolutely moments where Wilkie Collins takes us beyond the limits of what we would think possible, um,

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while also having sort of immense psychological realism and some of the most tense scenes that I have ever encountered.

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The other thing is, I'm only halfway through. She might turn out to be a ghost, in which case it is fantasy.

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I don't know. At the moment.

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It does look extremely exciting the ways that fantasy have moved from, you know,

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the ideas of ancient epics to what we have now where there are so many iterations of fantasy.

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I write fantasy for young people that I hope will be sufficiently clear and sharp that it can also be read by adults.

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There is, of course, the explosion in romanticism, which seems to use fantasy as a place to experience thrill and delight,

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and the idea of the confines of the romance genre being sort of exploded by the addition of dragons and elves and wizards.

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And then I think it is also, for many people,

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a way of thinking about really serious questions at a very profound need to them about things like colonialism,

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about gender, a way of exploring questions that, if offered in a straightforward essay form,

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might feel more easily dismissed, maybe fantasy as a way of being heard.

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I think often people are wary of being.

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We know this. People are wary of being lectured. We know that this is one of the great difficulties of any kind of offering of information,

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whether it be around climate change or vaccines or politics,

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but also more intimately about just learning within our normal frameworks of schools and universities.

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Fantasy can be a great way to bypass people's resistance because it offers such engines of delight and ecstasy, dread, horror.

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It's its visionary quality, I think, can be a way to offer people ideas that in other contexts, they might be resistant to.

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I always think of Ursula le Grand when she was receiving a an enormous award, saying that she was doing it on behalf of those who wrote fantastical,

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imaginative literature on the grounds that she was saying those people have been most readily

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dismissed because it is always easy to dismiss fantasy as the most fictional of fiction,

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but that it is in fantasy that we can think about justice, about right and wrong, that it is, as she says in that lecture,

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I think she says it is the instrument of ethics, the sharpest tool of a way of thinking about what is and is not true, what is and is not good.

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And I love that she stood up and said that she was a woman who had she been a man I think would be infinitely more famous.

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Ursula Le Guin is wildly famous,

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but if you think had she had the the intellectual authority that we grounded men of her generation and refused to grant women of her generation,

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I think she would be not just a household name amongst those who loved books, but a household name among those who do not.

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So because I write for young people, and young people are so powerfully in their bodies.

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I want to write stories that will offer the kinetic experience of movement,

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that will offer children a sense of living in the world on every inch of your skin, your nerves, your breath.

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I think children experience the world in a profoundly sensual way.

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I mean, they're their taste buds, uh, more eager than us.

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Um, and so I always want, when I write for children, to give them a sense of the bodily reality of the imagined world.

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And so for something like Impossible Creatures, I will try to draw on my real life experiences and pull them into the story.

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So, for instance, um, one of my girls, she's called Mal, and she flies with a flying coat that allows her to fly, but only when the wind blows.

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And so to try to make that has real as possible, I drew on my experience of things like trapeze.

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I briefly learnt the flying trapeze as research for a different book,

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The Good Thieves or Flying a Small Aeroplane, which I did in part for the explorer.

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Um, for the next book, book three that I'm currently writing, the Impossible Creature series.

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There is a scene in which they fly in a storm on a storm.

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And so for that, I went indoor skydiving to try to capture this sense of what it would be to be moved by wind,

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by weather, by storm, um, and what it would be like for gravity to make an exception for you.

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Just for a second. So for me, the idea of trying to research physical realities and then draw them into the fantastic has always been important.

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So I think, of course, one could just use one's imagination and.

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And whether or not for children, they would be able to tell the difference between things.

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Where I do have lived, experiences that can be threaded through the imagined and ones that are just wholesale drawn from,

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you know, the back depths of the human brain.

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I don't know they be able to tell, but for me, I do want to try to get as much granular reality into my world of fantasy,

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because the fantastical that I am, I've always been most drawn to it are things like Narnia,

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The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, where you can come from our world into theirs,

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and worlds like a lagoon, where her landscapes are often drawn from real life landscapes.

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So trying to put seeds of reality, because I think that they do flower with a sense of intimacy for the reader.

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Um,

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and I do also feel that just there is a delight in being able to talk to young people about writing as something that is not just of the imagination.

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That can also be a thing where you can go out into the world to seek ideas and experiences and then bring them back to the page.