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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.

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