[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.
But most of all, the Impossible Creatures series, uh, and The Poison King, the second in the series.
I think a fantasy is one of many. I think for me it is the one I have always loved most.
And I say in my talk, I think fantasy is philosophy's more gorgeously painted cousin.
It is a way of thinking about huge questions that are at the centre of the human heart,
and one of the ways we can do it with fantasy is to offer bright landscapes,
bright images, things that will get under the skin and be metabolised by the human heart latch themselves onto our consciousness.
And so I think often I do not think fantasy is the best form of literature.
I think there is no such thing as a best form of literature. For me, it is often one of the most vivid.
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.
Things from Gilgamesh thousands of years ago, the morte d'Arthur, Beowulf, the fairy Queen, and then of course,
more recent iterations of those imaginations, things like, you know, of course, Lewis and Tolkien, but also Alan Garner, Susan Cooper.
And to think about also ways that we have imagined fantasy in, in Shakespeare, um, The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream.
And to go all the way back to our great epic imaginings of huge landscapes and huge fears and things like the Odyssey,
I think that one of the great joys of writing fantasy is that you can look back over
thousands of years of the ways that we have thought about what it is to be a person,
and the possibilities of being a person in the world. Well, that's a great question.
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.
It's not quite fantasy, but it has elements of gestures towards the supernatural.
There are absolutely moments where Wilkie Collins takes us beyond the limits of what we would think possible, um,
while also having sort of immense psychological realism and some of the most tense scenes that I have ever encountered.
The other thing is, I'm only halfway through. She might turn out to be a ghost, in which case it is fantasy.
I don't know. At the moment.
It does look extremely exciting the ways that fantasy have moved from, you know,
the ideas of ancient epics to what we have now where there are so many iterations of fantasy.
I write fantasy for young people that I hope will be sufficiently clear and sharp that it can also be read by adults.
There is, of course, the explosion in romanticism, which seems to use fantasy as a place to experience thrill and delight,
and the idea of the confines of the romance genre being sort of exploded by the addition of dragons and elves and wizards.
And then I think it is also, for many people,
a way of thinking about really serious questions at a very profound need to them about things like colonialism,
about gender, a way of exploring questions that, if offered in a straightforward essay form,
might feel more easily dismissed, maybe fantasy as a way of being heard.
I think often people are wary of being.
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,
whether it be around climate change or vaccines or politics,
but also more intimately about just learning within our normal frameworks of schools and universities.
Fantasy can be a great way to bypass people's resistance because it offers such engines of delight and ecstasy, dread, horror.
It's its visionary quality, I think, can be a way to offer people ideas that in other contexts, they might be resistant to.
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,
imaginative literature on the grounds that she was saying those people have been most readily
dismissed because it is always easy to dismiss fantasy as the most fictional of fiction,
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,
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.
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.
Ursula Le Guin is wildly famous,
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,
I think she would be not just a household name amongst those who loved books, but a household name among those who do not.
So because I write for young people, and young people are so powerfully in their bodies.
I want to write stories that will offer the kinetic experience of movement,
that will offer children a sense of living in the world on every inch of your skin, your nerves, your breath.
I think children experience the world in a profoundly sensual way.
I mean, they're their taste buds, uh, more eager than us.
Um, and so I always want, when I write for children, to give them a sense of the bodily reality of the imagined world.
And so for something like Impossible Creatures, I will try to draw on my real life experiences and pull them into the story.
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.
And so to try to make that has real as possible, I drew on my experience of things like trapeze.
I briefly learnt the flying trapeze as research for a different book,
The Good Thieves or Flying a Small Aeroplane, which I did in part for the explorer.
Um, for the next book, book three that I'm currently writing, the Impossible Creature series.
There is a scene in which they fly in a storm on a storm.
And so for that, I went indoor skydiving to try to capture this sense of what it would be to be moved by wind,
by weather, by storm, um, and what it would be like for gravity to make an exception for you.
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.
So I think, of course, one could just use one's imagination and.
And whether or not for children, they would be able to tell the difference between things.
Where I do have lived, experiences that can be threaded through the imagined and ones that are just wholesale drawn from,
you know, the back depths of the human brain.
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,
because the fantastical that I am, I've always been most drawn to it are things like Narnia,
The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, where you can come from our world into theirs,
and worlds like a lagoon, where her landscapes are often drawn from real life landscapes.
So trying to put seeds of reality, because I think that they do flower with a sense of intimacy for the reader.
Um,
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.
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.