Katherine Rundell is the bestselling author of five children's novels and has won the Costa Children's Book Award, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Waterstones Children's Book Prize amongst many others. Katherine spent her childhood in Africa and Europe before taking her degree at the University of Oxford and becoming a Fellow of All Souls College. As well as writing, she studies Renaissance literature and is learning, very slowly, to fly a small aeroplane.

An unmissable essay on the importance of children's literature by the bestselling and award-winning author, Katherine Rundell.

'Rundell is the real deal, a writer of boundless gifts and extraordinary imaginative power whose novels will be read, cherished and reread long after most so-called "serious" novels are forgotten' - Observer

Katherine Rundell - Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and prize-winning author of five novels for children - explores how children's books ignite, and can re-ignite, the imagination; how children's fiction, with its unabashed emotion and playfulness, can awaken old hungers and create new perspectives on the world. This delightful and persuasive essay is for adult readers.

Read everything she writes

A winning polemic about how reading a children's book can remind us of the need to see things from different perspectives

Rundell's pen is gold-tipped

Rundell is now unarguably in the first rank

As an unashamed lover and reader of children's literature, I adored Katherine Rundell's Why You Should Read Children's Books ... [it's] time to remind yourself of the reason you fell in love with books and reading in the first place

It's a very short book but it packs a real punch. Rundell makes an irresistible case and reminds you of the wonder and excitement of reading, discovering and learning. She is a brilliant and ferocious communicator; I found her use of language and some of her tropes thrilling and fascinating and enormously generative. A real delight

Children's author Katherine Rundell is a fellow in English Literature at Oxford so she knows how to put an argument together. Here, she delivers a winning polemic about how reading a children's book can remind us of the need to see things from different perspectives

The Costa Award-winning children's author makes an impassioned case for adults to continue reading children's books. She explains what they can teach us, including kindness and courage, risk-taking and morality.

Just delicious