PW Close-Up: Katherine Rundell on 'Impossible Creatures'

Award-winning British novelist Katherine Rundell (Rooftoppers) loves to bring fantastical worlds to life. In September, Impossible Creatures, the first book in a new middle grade fantasy series, will hit U.S. shelves. About a boy who’s a descendant of a family of guardians to a secret world called the Archipelago where mythic creatures are real and in danger, Impossible Creatures is already a #1 bestseller in the U.K., where it was named the 2023 Waterstones Book of the Year. As the book's publication in the U.S. nears, PW spoke with Rundell about how her childhood informed her as a writer, what inspired Impossible Creatures, and why writing about endangered species matters.

You grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London. How did those experiences prepare you to write for young people?

I think growing up partly in Zimbabwe, where my father worked in international aid, had a huge impact on me. It meant that I was close to glorious wild spaces and had an experience of long days of unsupervised outdoor freedom that I want to try to re-create for children in my work. And the people I met taught me that we do not own the world; we are just one part of the great parliament of living things, and we owe the world our urgent protection.

What inspired Impossible Creatures?

I have always adored mythical creatures and the feeling of just-possible impossibility that comes with them. So I wanted to write a book that would allow children to feel that they are truly meeting mythical creatures—not just the creatures we know and love, like dragons and unicorns, but also the lesser-known ones that we invented hundreds of years ago and half forgot: like karkadanns (which are a kind of purplish-black unicorn that eat children) and kankos (miniature two-tailed foxes that bring luck), longmas (wild, scaled, winged horses) and ratatoskas (horned squirrels that spread rumors across the Archipelago). I wanted it to be as real as I could make it so that children feel the scratch of a griffin claw against their skin and smell a unicorn’s breath on their face.

Why did you want to create a series around this world? And what can we expect from the series going forward?

I knew that I had more story than could fit into a single book. I’m currently writing book two, and it’s such a joy to go back to the characters. I want the sequence to work a little like Narnia works, in that each one has its own unique story with a complete, rounded ending and you can read them in any order, but there’s an overarching narrative connecting them all.

There are some wonderful creatures in this book. What can you tell us about them?

I loved researching them. The hours I spent hunting for mythical creatures in archives and libraries were some of the happiest of my working life. Perhaps my favorite was the jaculus dragon that you find in Pliny’s Natural History, which, published in AD 77, is often called the very first encyclopedia. Alongside accounts of hedgehogs and bats, it contains an entirely serious account of the jaculus dragon, which “darts from the branches of trees... for these fly through the air even, just as though they were hurled from an engine.”

Why do you chose to write stories about protecting endangered species?

I wanted Impossible Creatures to be, first and foremost, a huge adventure—one that would grab children and refuse to let them go. I think it’s bad manners to offer children a story and then hand them a moral. But I also wanted to say: we live, currently, in a world of staggering beauty and on the precipice of unimaginable loss. We have already lost about 50% of the world’s wildlife in just the last 50 years. But we still can save so much. I wanted to write a book that would salute both the staggering richness and beauty of the living world that surrounds us, and also the danger of losing it before our knowledge—vast as it is—has begun to even skim the edges of the truth of the world’s complexity.

This is very much a coming-of-age story. What do you like best about characters Mal and Christopher?

I loved writing their friendship. There’s a bit in the book where Christopher thinks this: “Sometimes, if you are among the very lucky, a spark of understanding cuts like lightning across the space between two people. It’s a defibrillator for the heart. And it toughens you. It nourishes you. And the word we’ve chosen for it (which is an insufficient word for being so abruptly upended in a new and finer place) is friendship.”

What role does environmentalism play in this book?

The book is largely about adventure, and peril, and food, and jokes, and flying coats, but I also wanted it to say there are so many creatures in our world that would, if we weren’t used to them, seem as extraordinary as unicorns: narwhals and giraffes and swifts and hedgehogs. And unless we take care, they may well become mythical.

How does Impossible Creatures tackle themes of corruption and the ways that greed and selfishness can corrupt the world?

I wanted to offer children a vision of how an excess of power can eat away at someone’s humanity. I don’t want to give away the ending, but in the book, there’s a very literal metaphor for that—for the ways power can corrupt and transform and diminish us.

Impossible Creatures has already received rave reviews in the U.K., with reviewers comparing it to fantasy classics like His Dark Materials, the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Hobbit. How does it feel to be in such esteemed company?

A real joy! It’s a little overwhelming, but it’s an honor to be writing in the same tradition that those greats belong to—a tradition of fantasy that dates back thousands of years.

The book’s packaging will include gold foil and sprayed edges and feature beautiful black-and-white illustrations. What can you tell us about the visual elements of the book and what they’ll add to the reading experience?

I love the illustrations inside the book by the wonderful Ashley Mackenzie, and the illustrated bestiary and the map by the superbly talented Virginia Allyn. Those visual elements help children get swept away by the story—they give the reader’s visual imagination a leaping-off point of huge beauty.