Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S9 Ep15: Katherine Rundell brings Vick to tears

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

In a first for Bookshelfie, Vick is brought to tears by bestselling author Katherine Rundell’s rousing speech on the importance of teaching children courage and not breaking faith with the beauty and love of the world.Katherine’s novels for children have won the Waterstones Book of the Year, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children’s Book Award, among many others. In 2024, she was named the British Book Awards Author of the Year, and Impossible Creatures won the Children’s Fiction Book of the Year. She is a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and her books for adults include Super-Infinite, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize. The third installment of her Impossible Creatures series The Neverfear is out now with Bloomsbury. Katherine’s book choices are:06:02 Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery15:00 Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido21:18 Emma by Jane Austen30:09 A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin37:50 Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia LockwoodYou can buy all books mentioned from our dedicated shelf on Bookshop.org  – every purchase supports the work of the Women's Prize Trust and independent bookshops. Every week on Bookshelfie, Vick Hope is joined by inspirational women to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize for Fiction, the greatest celebration of female creativity in the world, is run by the Women’s Prize Trust, the charity building a better future by championing women’s writing. Don’t want to miss the rest of season nine? Follow or subscribe now!This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

Coming up on footshelfy, the greatest children's stories I think are about endurance, about power, about death, about hope. And I think we underestimate them at our peril. And I do think that when you're young, if you're lucky and you find the right book, it is very much akin to falling in love when you're older. It is this feeling of uncovering something fresh that you didn't know was there before. The world will not always be fair. It will break faith with you. some point somebody who you would die for will die. And yet, it is worth your courage, standing ovations await your bravery. It is worth giving all of your love to the world because if you don't,

you won't see it in its full clarity. I just had a baby, so that's just really, it just really taught me. Congratulations. Sorry. Hello, I'm Vic Hope and this is Bookshelfy, the podcast from the Women's Prize that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them. Now, before we begin, remember to subscribe or follow so you never miss an episode with thanks to our sponsor, Bailey's. Today, I'm joined by Catherine Rundle. Catherine is a multi-million best-selling author whose novels for children have won the Waterstones Book of the Year, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children's Book Award, among many others. In 2024, she was named the British Book Awards author of the year,

and Impossible Creatures won the Children's Fiction Book of the Year. She's a fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and her books for adults include Super Infinite, winner of the Bailey Gifford Prize. The third instalment of her Impossible Creatures series, The Never Fear, is out now with Bloomsbury. Welcome, Catherine. Thank you so much. It's a real delight to be here. It's a pleasure. Honestly, I do want to say, and I hope you don't mind me saying, but you have such a lovely energy.

We've been recording in this studio all morning, and I opened the door. You were sitting there, and there was like a beam of light. I hear me, and you brought that beam into the studio, so thank you. Thank you. That's from best of kind. Let's begin with your children's fiction, which has captured the hearts of so many young and also older readers. And you've said in past interviews that the aim of the children's author,

and I quote, is to provide a framework to practice literacy, but also a framework to practice the things of the heart. It's the national year of reading, and I'd love to hear more about this as your guiding mission. So I think at its very best, the finest children's fiction, it teaches children how to look for happiness. It teaches them a blueprint for joy. I think one of the things that children need to know

is that the world is infinite and various and awaits their courage. And I think great children's literature, things like Pippi Longstocking and the Moomin's, Northern Lights, Philip Pullman, Shana Jackson, Mallory Blackman. These are people who have created worlds that children can enter. And when they are in them, they can find a variety of ways of being a person who is able to give and receive love. But also a variety of ways of being funny, tough, brave, bold. The greatest children's stories I think are about. endurance about power, about death, about hope. And I think we underestimate them at our peril,

because we need them both, I think, in childhood. In childhood when they are the building blocks for joy, but also in adulthood. I think if you go back and read children's books in your adulthood, you can find in them some of that spirit of imaginative intensity and some of the process of discovery becomes within you again, I think they can be galvanic. Yeah, I feel like every adult should return to children's books every once in a while

because I think we still need them, but you're right at that period of your life where your moral compass is being formed, where your understanding of the world is being formed, they can give so much to our children. Have you been surprised at the crossover success of your books that adults have loved too? That has been one of the great joys that I have writers from children as young as six. Mostly my children's books have aimed at sort of 12-ish, maybe 9 to 14. But you get some really lovely, precocious younger kids. But then I also get letters from adults in their 50s, in their 80s, saying that they found in them some of the spirit of childhood.

And some of the spirit of discovery and invention. You know, I think one of the things that children's books can do is explore the imagination right to its furthest point. because there is no limit to what you can put in a children's book. Well, I hope that any adults watching this who might want to return to some children's books, and particularly yours, they feel inspired to do that because there's so much to gain from them. And on the subject of the importance of reading widely

for our imaginations and everything, that that gives us, what do you like to read? Do you turn to children's books in your reading? I do. So a lot of my reading is I read poetry, plays. I love classics, but also I will always make sure that I am harking back to the great children's books. Because the truly great ones do have something in them. There is a reason that they have endured. A kind of precision about the imagination and a kind of revelatory clarity about love. something like the Railway Children by E. Nesbitt or one of my very favourites, Anna Green Gables.

These books, I think, have a vision of what it is to be a human in them. Well, I think that's a perfect place for us to delve into the first of your bookshelfy picks today, which is Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. First published in 1908, Anne of Green Gables is a classic of children's literature. The story follows 11-year-old orphan, Anne Shirley, sent by mistake to live with two middle-aged siblings, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert. Expecting a strong boy to help them plow through the work on the farm, the spindly redhead girl who knocks on their door instead is a surprise.

But it's not long before Anne charms her way into the Cuthbert's hearts with her big imagination and never-ending chatter. Now, very appropriate to start with this book. How old were you when you first read it? Do you remember? I think I must have been about eight. And I remember falling so in. love with this character. I think the vast majority of girls will find something of Anne in themselves because she is so various. You know, she has an intensity and an extrovertedness for the extroverts, but she also has a romance for the romantics. And when I was, I think I

must have been about 10, I played her in a, in a, I guess like a local amateur dramatics. Okay. And, you know, I had my hair in two. and plaits. They didn't die at red. Alas, I longed for it, but I was in Zimbabwe at the time. I didn't think we had the herd eye. But it felt like knowing this character and like a process of falling in love. And I do think that when you're young, if you're lucky and you find the right book, it is very much akin to falling in love when you're older. It is this feeling of uncovering something fresh that you didn't know was there before. And I think that Anne of Green Gables, I think she is one of the most.

perfect depictions of what it is when you are young to yearn. It's often said about Huckleberry Thin that he is in many ways a depiction of pure childhood of what it is to be a young boy. I think in many ways Anne is a depiction of what it is to long for things as a girl, that deep, deep, intense yearning that she has for love and for home and for family and for belonging and for safety, but also for the romance of the world, for the beauty of the world, she doesn't want to let it pass her by. Her desire, not just to know it, but to share it. She is an exclamatory creature. And I know that everyone, anyone listening who has children, the exclamatriness of children can, of course, be exhausting. But it is one of their great qualities that for them, they are still in the process of discovery and everything they see is new.

And when they pointed out to us, it is worth listening to their gestures, to the freshness of the world. And Anne is that distilled down and down and down. Yeah. Oh, that curiosity, that optimism, that emotional resilience that we see in Anne. Do you try to incorporate those into the young protagonists that you write? I think so. I think that probably my love of Anne probably does play out in the characters I write now. I think there is a sense when you meet her that you are meeting a whole person.

She has flaws. Anna Mon Gori wasn't afraid to make her frustrating. And there isn't a sense that you would find an unexasperating, perfect, something to aspire to without question. She's a girl. A girl on the page. And it is so hard to capture an entire person and put them just down in. in the flimsy thing we have in paper and ink, she is a totally robust flesh and blood creature.

And I think when I try to write my child characters, I try to write characters that when children meet them, they would feel like they could, you know, grab them by the wrist, that they would feel real, that they would have the same sense of stepping out of the page. And I think that one of the ways that we do that is to make sure that the character you're creating is not unearthly perfect, to make sure that they are somebody who has flaws, doubts, nuances, halting failings,

and yet are profoundly worth your love. Because I think that way you are teaching young people to imagine someone else's interior life with the nuance and intricacy that it deserves. I know your father was an aid worker and you were out in Zimbabwe living there for five years. So paint me a picture of that time of your life. And why did Anne speak to you, her yearning for beauty and love? Why did that speak to you then? I think it was two things.

One of them is Anne has a wild passion for the natural world. When Matthew Cuffbert comes to pick her up, she says, I was beginning to think you weren't coming for me. And I was thinking that if you didn't come, I would go down that alley to the cherry tree and climb up into it and sleep all night. And it would be wonderful to sleep in a wild cherry tree. It would be like being a bride. You would be surrounded by flowers.

She has this sense that she has no sense that the natural world is separate from her. She wants to embrace it. She wants to name the pond, the sacred lake. She wants to see beauty in things that are ordinary. In Zimbabwe, I had this extraordinary luck in being exposed to a landscape that is extraordinarily beautiful, the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. And I wanted so deeply to see it, to know it, to understand it. I wanted to be in it.

I wanted to be outside all the time. I wanted to know the birds and insects. And I think Anne gives a model for somebody who wants to watch the world closely. And I think the other thing is that I've spoken elsewhere occasionally about the great loss of my childhood, which was that when I was nine years old, my sister became very ill. And when I was 10, she died. And there is a sense that. Anne has that grief will come for us.

Anne has already faced huge grief. She's an orphan. It doesn't mean that you have to be crushed. It does mean that you will have to love harder. You have no choice. Those are the options. And I think she offered a model of what that loving harder might look like. Just faced with horror, you can either go dark or you can insist.

on seeing the joy of the world. And I love that in her. And we shouldn't shy away from talking about grief and talking about death, this thing that will come to us all to children because it gives them the tools, it arms them with, as you say, the way that they can process and deal with that and derive joy from it, which is powerful for them. And in fact, it's what they deserve.

They deserve it utterly. And especially the children of today. Nowadays, in many ways, children are divorced from death in their community. They are very much less likely to have seen a dead body than they would a hundred years ago where everybody would have seen a dead relative laid out. But they have access to the knowledge of the world's horror much younger and much more intimately, no longer in a printed newspaper on the kitchen table, on your parents' phone, on the television, on if you have a phone as a child, coming at you in the most.

intimate spaces in your bedroom, in your classroom. I think that we need therefore to offer children if they are going to know in a way that we are unable at the moment to protect them from, the sadness, the brokenness of the world, we need to give them equal and opposite joy. An equal and opposite sense of the world's beauty, its creativity, its talent, its jokes, its capacity for people to love starting when they are born and not stopping until the day of their death. I think we need to give them a sense that yes, the world will not always be fair. It will break faith with you. And at some point, somebody who you would die for will die. And yet, it is worth your courage, standing ovations o'ert your bravery. It is worth giving all of your

love to the world because if you don't, you won't see it in its full clarity. I just had a baby, so that's just really, it just really taught me. Congratulations. Sorry. But here's to giving him all that joy and the tools with which to deal with whatever the world has for him. Which you will give him with, you know, the joy of come. Sorry, I've not ever cried on this podcast.

Let's talk about your second book, Shelfy book, Catherine, which is Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Tripido. Sorry. I'm so sorry. No, it's really good tears. It's really important tears. In Barbara Trapido's first novel, A Coming of Age story, 18-year-old Catherine navigates life with the eccentric and bohemian Goldman family

at the start of her university journey. At first, the family feels like home, but a romantic entanglement and subsequent heartbreak leave her with no choice but to leave. Funny and rich with characters, we follow her journey back into the fold after more than a decade away, which yields many unexpected surprises. Tell us why you chose this book.

I chose this in part because I think comedy is an underrated genre for how intelligent and sharp and necessary it is. Barbara Trapido is one of our great living comic writers. And brother than more famous, Jack, I read it when I was in my very early 20s. I think I was 20 years old. And I remember thinking, this is what a book can do in terms of making you feel like there is infinite space for wit in the world, that a joke has its own life, that it sort of resonates outward through your day.

She's also one of those writers who is able to create a sense of family and of intimacy. You long to know that family. You long to be part of that world. But also, I do think one of the great joys of that book is that you read it in a day. It's not long, and it's easy in. in the sense of every sentence is delicious. It's so compelling. It's so compelling, isn't it?

You know, you read it with the same easy delight as, you know, a thriller. And then it lasts in your head, and it resonates in your head, the warmth of it, that it feels like somebody who cared enough about pleasure, about delight, to put it with all her power and all of her clarity of mind into the pages of a book. And then you can fish it out when you need it. Catherine in this book is 18 years old and being a teenager is such a particular moment in our lives. I know that you had a real culture shock during your teenage years because we've talked about your childhood, we've talked about some bad way, but you moved to Belgium aged 14. What was that time like for you?

I found it very difficult to be 14. My brilliant stepdaughter is 14 at the moment. It is a tough year. She is doing it with infinitely more aplomb and grace than I am than I did rather. But I found being a teenager, a barrage of complexity, still yearning for those pleasures that are enduring through our lives. So I still longed for the outside and I still longed for beauty and ideas. But it is hard to be a teenager, not just in that you're not just in that you. your body and mind are changing, but what the world demands of you changes so quickly what

your peers demand of you. And I think that the depiction in Brother of the More Famous Jack of a young woman who is just finishing school and about to start university and who is trying to invent what flair might look like, what aplomb might look like, what courage might look like for her, the idea that at its best, teenagerhood is a process of inventing. I think is one of the things that that book would be a glory to have as a teenager. I read it when I was 20, so it was already a little too late for me. But I think that if I could, I would give this book to every single 15-year-old in the country and say, read this.

I'm just trying to think, is it actually quite scurrilous? Well, it's been described by Rachel Cusk as brilliantly lewd. Yes, I have a feeling it is, but I think it's fine. You know, exactly the right amount of lewd for a 15-year-old, I reckon. It's quite sexy. Yeah. It has a vision of sex that I think, again, is really helpful for a young person to encounter in that some of the sex she has is very disappointing. And some of the sex she has is revelatory.

And there is no sense that either of them is inevitable. Have you pressed this into the hands of your stepdaughter? I think that she is probably still a couple of years off. Currently, her great passion is horses. Okay, well, let's just concentrate on the horses. Exactly. When that changes. The book is waiting.

Barbara Trapida's work has a devoted following, but perhaps less mainstream recognition. What do you wish more readers would know about her? I long for her to be one of the most famous writers in England. I think she deserves so much more fame. And I do think one of the reasons that she is not as famous as she should be is that she is a woman who writes about domestic topics. And I think that therefore, and she is also a woman who writes funny literature.

all of those categories have been overlooked and occasionally denigrated by our wider culture. And I think that if people could read these books, not just this one, they are, there's a number of books that are, they're not exactly sequels, they just have intersecting characters who you meet again. Temples of Delight is one. Juggling is maybe my favourite of the others. And I think that if people could discover Barbara Chapido, they would not just discover a wealth of pleasure. awaiting them, but also a sense of a book as being something that you can hold in the same warmth as you can, a friend. This episode of Bookshelfy is sponsored by Bayleys. Bayleys is proudly supporting the 26 Women's Prize for Fiction, helping showcase incredible

writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Bayleys is the perfect adult treat. whether shaking in a cocktail over ice cream or paired with your favourite book. Check out baillies.com for our favourite bailey's recipes. Well, on to another book that we can hold in the same warmth as we can a friend. Your third book, Shelfy book, is Emma by Jane Austen. The last novel by Jane Austen published during her lifetime,

Emma is a comedy of manners, exploring the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian Regency England. The protagonist, Emma, is young, rich and independent, and decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance. Tell us why you selected this as a work of genius. So this is my favourite book of all. time by my favorite writer. And it's one that I think you could read 20 or 100 times and still discover something new in it every time. Jane Austen herself said, I'm writing a character that I

think nobody but myself will much like. She has been proved wrong over the next hundreds of years in that I love Emma Woodhouse. I love the idea that Austin insisted that this woman is flawed, that she is frustrating, that she is delusional in places, that she is deeply mistaken about the impact of her own actions on the world, and yet she is worth our attention, our time and our love. I love also the plot. It's a fantastic, you couldn't read it almost like a murder mystery, you know, that it has a secret at the heart of it.

You know, what is Frank Churchill's relationship to the village? What is his relationship to Jane? Who is Emma, in fact, truly in love? who is Harriet in love with. These questions, they play out, the book is full of riddles. So they play at writing out riddles. They play at word games where you pick out letters to form words. It's a book of riddles.

And there is this idea that the human heart is a riddle. And that Jane Austen is in some ways giving us some of the keys to that riddle. But also at the conclusion of the book, you still know that the riddle endures and continues. The riddle of the heart will always injure. That's the point. That's not going to get to the end of it. Your party trick, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, is knowing the whole of Emma off by heart. Is that correct?

So if you read me one sentence of Emma, I can usually tell you at least exactly where we are in the book and sometimes the next sentence. I should say that this is a party trick that nobody wants it to party. Like, oh, come on, even at my party, it'll be very, very welcome. Can we test it? We can test it. Let's give it to go. Okay. What line follows?

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. I must, I will, tell you truth while I can. Is it that? It's the, Emma, I cannot make speeches. It's the moment where Mr. Knightley is proposing to Emma. And he has told her, no, it's not, you know? No, it is. It's but you know what I am, you hear nothing but truth from me, I have blamed you and lectured you and you have borne it.

Like no other woman in England would have borne it. Bear with me now, Emma. And then he proposes to her. And it says, and what did she say? Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. So you never know what she says to him. It's devastating.

It's devastating. And it was correct. in my little game show this is my dinner party and it's been a perfect party trick what sort of responses do you get when you whip it out

I am very grateful that it comes out fairly rarely it came up because a friend of mine worked out that I knew it absurdly well and started like a little show dog making me do it at various parties but I do think that it is one of those books where every

sentence is perfect Oh, yeah. The word economy is just. I mean, Jane Austen is at her most satirical here as well. She's so funny. What do you think makes her the greatest social observer and chronicler of her times? So I think Jane Austen's vision of us was, I think it comes from a perfect storm. First, she was a genius. Oh, there's that. First of all, that's the step one. A woman who was raised in a household of books at a time when that was fairly rare with a huge number of siblings who she longed to make laugh. So she learnt that one of her currencies very young was that she could create wit that her brothers would laugh at. And the way she could do it was by mimicking and commenting on the adults around them.

So it was a weapon that she had tucked into her shoe like a little knife from the age of six or seven. then of course she was a woman who did not marry and therefore was not required to move out of society into the domestic space in the same way but a woman who nonetheless was within the domestic space who famously used to write on a small table and had to brush aside the pages when someone came to call so she had this this sort of doubleness on the one hand outside of the intimacy of what it would be had she had to be a wife, the ways that wives were required to serve the household, but also the deep knowledge of it. And then I think that she had a sense, if you read her letters, she is so funny, and some of her wit is a way of saving her from despair, that there was a cage into which she was born,

but if you can laugh at the cage, then at least it will feel larger. And I think for her, her genius is the thing that liberates her at a time when liberation for women was very rare. And I think, you know, the other thing that I think about her and about George Eliot, neither of them looked like women who were going to marry well looked. Jane Austen was not known for being unattractive, but also not known for being beautiful. And the sort of idiosyncrasy of her face is one of the things that allowed her to move through the world without the same romantic clamour that might have attached to her had she been breathtakingly gorgeous. George Elliott, my other great hero, if I hadn't picked Emma, I would have picked Middlemarch. When she was young, I was reading a wonderful book by Car Calahle called The Marriage Question very recently in which she has discovered that when George Eliot was very little, she was thought so plain.

that her father looked at her when she was sort of four years old and thought, no one will marry that girl and therefore I will teach her. So Latin, Greek, French, German, had George Elliott been born with exquisite curls in a button nose, we never would have had middle march. The ways that people were required to move through the world in terms of their marriageability and desirability were so onerous and in many ways such a trap that, For those women, looking idiosyncratic, was in some ways a way out. We all like to think that society is in a very different place now.

But is it? I long for us to come farther than we have. We could have, by now, done so much better. We could have by now created the conditions for female creativity to flourish by the most basic things which in the 1970s, people would be stunned that we don't have them now. universally available free child care, maybe wages for housework, but certainly the idea that the raising of your child is a cultural, social project which we all need to engage in. That, I think, if we could have achieved a little further on that road, we would have liberated more women to have full access to the range and brilliance of their imaginations.

But I do still have hope, even though we are in a hard time. It only takes a few visionaries, aided by the rest of us in our communities, with our determination, our money, our politics. Huge change remains possible and I still believe that it is coming. Sometimes we take so many steps forward and sometimes I know we feel like we're taking steps back, but here's the more steps forward. Exactly. Let's talk about your fourth book, Shelfy book today, which is A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. first published in the UK in 1971. This has been considered a classic of children's fantasy ever since.

It follows the story of GED or Jed. We don't know. We don't know. We've never heard it out loud. We've only read it. A poor Smith's son, who discovers a magical talent and is sent away from home to a wizard school. During a duel with a fellow student, he summons a terrible shadow creature, which he tries to banish. but it continues to haunt him.

Ultimately, he learns that fears and shadows are to be faced and that darkness is as much a part of us as the light. So we turn to fantasy and sci-fi from a literary giant of the 20th century now. Why have you chosen this book today? I love this book. This is one that I would try to get to every child in the world. I love the way that it has established without doubt. that you can write a book that is, if you were to describe its plot, absurd, full of dragons,

people talking in ancient languages to dragons, summoning magical trees and strange spirits, and also be a book about power and about dread and about horror and about courage. And she wrote it for 14, 15-year-olds. she refused to condescend to the young. And one of the things that I as a young person found most frustrating is the way that we consistently talk down to children, that we consistently underestimate their intelligence. We fail to remember that their love is real love,

their fear is real fear, their delight is real delight. That these are not sort of flimsy similes of adult emotions, that a child has the same profundity, just not the same breadth of horizon. And she wrote a book that acknowledges that, that does honour to a child's intelligence. And I also just loved fantasy and still do. It's a thing I've adored since I was very young. The idea that fantasy might be a space where you can imagine huge possibilities,

where you can conjure with extraordinary images and see where they take you intellectually and emotionally. How do you feel like Le Guin pushed the boundaries of the genre for you? Because you said that she mapped out fantasy in extraordinary ways. So she had the thing that Tolkien has of a completely coherent world. She has a map. I think all great fantasies must have a map. She has an actual language that she has parts of, that she has invented. She also has a sense of her own magical system that is entirely coherent within itself.

And she had a sense that this is a world with its own rules, its own goodness, its own sorrows. And therefore, when you follow her into it as a kid, you do feel like you are stepping into something textured and real. And she was also, you know, she was an extraordinary woman in terms of her knowledge of the world. Her father was an anthropologist. She had a sense of the huge value of multiplicity of cultures. And, of course, in Earthsea, everybody in less stated otherwise is of darker skin. Deep, deep, brown, black, red, brown. She describes all of these sensitive skin.

There's only one group of people who have a sort of white, pinkish skin. And she said she just was sick of the idea that in fantasy, everyone was white and less specified otherwise. In her books, everyone is black in less specified otherwise. And then when it was adapted for film, they made everyone a sort of, of white, pasty, medieval. Classic. Of course they didn't. Let's talk about world building, because your world building has prompted comparisons with Tolkien, who you just mentioned, C.S. Lewis Pullman.

Are there elements of Liguin's world building that you consciously return to in your work? I think so. So I wanted the sense of voyaging. So she has created a cluster of islands. The place where my fantasy series takes place is called Glimmoria, the Glimmoria, the Glimm. Moria archipelago and I know that there is part of Le Guin in that. One of my characters is a woman scholar who is the female love interest of the adult couple. And she's called Irian Gwynn after Ursula McGuin as a salute to how much I have loved her work.

Well, Imposable Creatures, your fantasy series that you mentioned there is a global publishing phenomenon, published in 34 languages, likened to Harry Potter the Hunger Games. Twilight, a film deal was announced with Disney, which you and your creative and romantic partner, Charles, are co-producing as Impossible Films. Can you tell us anything more about that? Any updates on that?

So it's been so much fun. I'm currently writing the script myself, and I have spent quite a lot of time with the Disney creative team, sometimes in L.A., just thinking about how do you take a book which is an interior

experience where you have access a front row seat to your protagonist's heart and how do you take it so that you can only know them from the outside how do we know them as intimately in film what does that look like what visual metaphors can we deploy to get the same intimacy

and also what does film give you that books never could in terms of the sweep of visual pleasure like the main two characters. One of them is a boy called Christopher from R-World and one of them is a girl called Mal from Glamoria and she has a coat that allows her to fly but only when the wind blows.

And I can write about Mal flying through clouds but of course when we come to film it we can film actual flying up above the shapes of the clouds. We can see it. We can see it and the joy of that I think will be such a thrill. I think front row seats to the protagonist's heart is my favourite phrase.

Because yes, that's what a book is, but you're right. There is scope again in film to do something different. So how important is it for you to, I guess remaining true can mean a lot of different things, truth as veracity or truth as true to the spirit of. You choose how you want to adapt. How do you want to adapt? So we decided going into this, because I'm writing it, one of the reasons I so wanted to write it myself is there are quite a lot of change.

that I want to make. And because I'm the author of it, this way young people watching it, seeing a difference will know I made that choice. It was intentional. So there is, the ending will be the same ending. And I hope that the heart will be the same heart. But some of the major plot points will shift a little. And I also want things that in the writing, I have never excelled at. I'm not great at writing, for instance, a massive fight scene. Whereas I love to watch a massive fight scene. And writing them in a screenplay is much easier. You just say, they fight.

And then the choreographer gets away. Exactly. Then some other visionary goes and does that fabulous. They can understand it. Well, from fantasy now to memoir, we have gone on such a journey through your bookshelfy picks. Your fifth and final pick being Priestaddy, a memoir by Patricia Lockwood. This is the best-selling debut memoir by the Women's Prize shortlisted novelist and poet who is a genius. A genius. A genius. In an impoverished nuclear waste riddled area of the American

Midwest, Lockwood's gun-toting, guitar riffing, frequently semi-naked father undergoes a religious conversion on a submarine. Fast forward to the present and an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, where she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness and to reckon with the dark side of her. religious upbringing. Priest-daddy is an unforgettable story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity. You say you've given priest-daddy to at least seven people and every one of them has loved it. What is it about this book that makes it so brilliant and makes you want to press it into the hands of others? So I am so glad that you said she's a genius. I think we overuse

the term, but she's the real thing. She is the real thing. She is the real. McCoy, I think she must be one of the finest living writers that we have. Her mind is not like any other mind on the planet. And one of the great gifts that true writers like her have is being able to capture that and put it on paper. When I read it, it was like the top of my head came off. I had never read anything like it. It is the most idiosyncratic book I'd read of the last decade. And it is also incredibly readable. It's so funny. It's so pacey. And so I read it. I immediately bought one for my partner and for my best friend.

And then I just bulk bought them. So I still have three on my shelf that are waiting. I had 10. So you aren't actually pressing your version. No, no, no. No one else is getting old of that. You're buying them for others. I was very, very kind of being generous.

And the great thing is we both live in the world of books. I often give people books and I will either get like, oh, thank you so much. Or, you know, enjoyed it. Or people very sweetly lie. This one I have had rabid responses from people. It is the book that I have given people that most of them say, I have now bought three extra to pass on. It is just like being in the company of someone so funny,

so incredibly insightful about the world while being able to put it in a way that makes it feel easier to live with. She is another one of those geniuses who sees that the world is not easy, but offers ways to face that with a kind of integrity of imagination. And one of the great comic geniuses of all time, I can't wait to see what she does next. I long for more memoir, non-fiction, fiction, I wish she wrote 10 books a year. Well, that's it. She writes across genres.

She has this poetic sensibility that make her so unique as a writer, no matter what she's writing and her voice is exquisite. it. Like you, Patricia Lockwood, she's written everything from literary criticism to online poetry, which in itself is its own genre. Yeah. Likewise, you've written extensively about the poet John Dunn, alongside your children's fiction. Do these different forms and genres feed into each other? And do you see traces of, say, Dunn in your children's fiction? Yes, I think so. So one of the things that I never tell young people because if someone told me this when I was 12, I would take it as a watertight reason not to read the book. Impossible Creatures, the first in the five book series, is based

very, very loosely on a John Dunn poem, one that he wrote in about 1600 called Metempsychosis, which imagines a soul being born of the first apple of the first tree, and then transmigrating into a fish and a wolf, and then a person, and he was going to imagine it becoming person after person after person throughout history and then realized that's blasphemy under the church laws at the time he could have gone to prison for it so he put it away hid it and then you know 400 years later I read it and and I wanted to ask well what if that had happened what if there was a soul born of the tree of knowledge and what if it was person after person and every time they were born and died they did not forget what they had seen so they aren't a god

but they are immortal and they have seen us right from the very beginning. And I think this is one of the questions that we all ask ourselves all the time, consciously or otherwise, what of us is most worth loving and what of us is most worth holding on to? And I think if you had lived from the beginning of humanity, you would have seen all of the chaos we have created, all of our war and corruption and horror. But think what you would have seen, the birth. Think of the births you would have seen, the new possibilities, the learning, the delight,

the unfurling of each imagination, the sheer joy you would have witnessed, the dancing, the jokes, the writing. And so the book asks, it has, I mustn't give away too much for the plot, but any adult reading it would not be shocked to discover that one of the children turns out to be the immortal, takes the potion that allows them to remember everything they have ever known, and they understand that the question we are asked is do you say yes or no? Do you say to the world, to living boldly, to humanity itself,

on balance, no. Mankind is not worth the horror we visit on each other, which is very great. Or do you say greater even than the world's chaos are its miracles and the greatest miracle that has ever been invented is human love? And therefore, yes. And the last word of the book is yes. Well, we are still here or we continue to love. And so the answer is yes.

It is always yes. I think, you know, what is a book but a yes? And what is falling in love but a yes? And what is having a child but the great yes? You know, I think that we, it is the great thing we do that we keep saying over and over in our infinitely unique ways. Yes. If the book is the yes, the love is the yes, there is this synergy and this constant living. You are your books.

Your books are you. I'd love to know if there's a memoir in you as a result because it's so intertwined. You know, your life is intertwined with the worlds that you create. I think if I were to write a memoir, it would be when I was 89. I think I would find it very difficult to live in a world in which I'd written a memoir. I'm just going to keep reading the geniuses who do it for us, Patricia Lockwood. And her like, thank you, Patricia Lockford, for all your work and your memoir. And your life.

And her life. And your life. We appreciate it. Oh, I mean, spanning the darkness, but then the absurd, the sense of humor, the love, the light. She's, yeah, she takes us on this journey. And we're very lucky to get to go on it. Oh, I think so.

I can't wait to see what comes next from Patricia Lockwood. It will be something spectacular. And, Catherine, what comes next from you? So next is The Never Fear. That will be out in August. and then I'll be working on the script. And that has been such a delight. It takes a lot of time, but time which I am grateful to have to give to it.

And then book four in the series, there'll be five. And so until that's over, that will be my life. Well, thank you for creating these worlds, but also these philosophies. And it's not even a philosophy. It's the space for us to be able to open our own minds, to come to our own conclusions, to understand ourselves, to find that love, that light ourselves. And I think it's so important, so I appreciate that.

Thank you. And I appreciate the time that you've taken to make me cry, make me laugh. For everyone listening, whatever journey you've been on, it's been really beautiful. I do have to ask you one more question, which is if you had to choose one book from your list of five today as a favourite, which would it be in why? That one is easy in that Emma has so much of my heart. I read it as a kid. has lived with me into adulthood.

For anybody who loves audiobooks, Prunelis Gales' reading of Emma is the Sistine Chapel of audiobooks. It is a thing of crystalline perfection. But that book seems to me to say, yes, you can be faulted, ridiculous, foolish, and still so deeply worth loving. And Jane Austen was a woman who saw us with such clarity and adore us anyway.

What a beautiful way to end and a gem, a pearl that we can take with us. This has been a lovely, lovely episode. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Vic Hope and that was Bookshelfy from the Women's Prize, supported by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thanks for joining me for this episode.

You'll find all the books that we discussed in our show notes. There's also a link to our bookshop.org shelf where every purchase supports independent bookshops and the work of the Women's Prize Trust, a charity helping build a better future by championing women's writing. Now remember to hit the follow or subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you like this one, then leave us a rating or review to help other readers discover even more brilliant books by women. I'll see you next time.