When Katherine Rundell was growing up in Zimbabwe, her parents pinned a John Donne poem by the bathroom sink for their four children to read while they were brushing their teeth. “I do mean Go and Catch a Falling Star rather than To His Mistress Going to Bed,” laughs Rundell, seated in a London hotel. “It was age appropriate.” So began a love affair with Donne that took off in her late teens and led to her studying his poetry for a PhD – and now winning the Baillie Gifford prize for Super-Infinite, her biography of the poet and her second book for adults (she is the author of five children’s books). At 35, she is the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious award for nonfiction.
That the life of a 400-year-old metaphysical poet should beat shortlisted books about such issues as the migrant crisis and British colonialism is testament to the eloquence and passion of Super-Infinite. “This is both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism,” Rundell tells the reader at the start. “I wanted to write something that will push people towards his poetry. My great hope was that I might put people in a position where they would be more readily able to unfurl what he’s doing, because he is famously difficult. And his difficulty has its own power and joy. He offers us a mode of living. He offers us a sense of what we might do with our minds. He offers a model of burning originality. And I love him for that.”
Rundell talks in the rich tones of a classical actor and has a scholar’s fluency in her subject. But there is nothing dusty or abstract about her Donne. With his arched eyebrows and dashing outfits, he is, according to Rundell “the greatest writer of desire in the English language” – a sort of Mick Jagger of the Renaissance, who wrote about sex, she tells us, in a way that nobody has, before or since. And the word most used in his poetry is “love”. What’s not to love?
Donne’s rather unchivalrous allusions – he compares the sweat of a rival’s mistress to “menstruous boils” – have not won over modern readers (scholar James Shapiro noted Donne courses being cancelled because of objections from female students). “How do you love someone who is very clearly engaging in misogynistic traditions and making them especially vivid?” Rundell asks. While she feels it would be “wildly anachronistic” to prosecute Donne as a misogynist, she doesn’t think you should gloss over the fact that “for every poem that salutes the female body and adores it, there are poems which denigrate, and even degrade the idea of the female”.
It is the sometimes unappealing, or downright weird, conceits (sex as a flea bite, lovers as a mathematical compass) that make his writing on desire so compelling, she argues, both back in the 16th century (when lovers were doves or roses) and today. “I do think a lot of the visions we have of sex and sexuality today are profoundly depressing. You tap them and they ring like money. I think his can offer you a way around that.”
In its lively accounts of the treachery and intrigues of the Renaissance court, Super-Infinite recalls Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, and in the sympathetic domestic details of Donne’s marriage (poor Anne had 12 pregnancies in 16 years) has a strong affinity to Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning Hamnet. Rundell is a huge fan of Mantel, who shared her love of Donne. “Mantel said that he could do both the love and the dread,” Rundell says. “She had something akin to Donne, in that huge generosity, and that acknowledgment of the dark that we could do, the joy that we could be.”
There is also something of the proselytising zeal of a posh self-help manual in her insistence on the life-affirming benefits of reading her favourite poet. “Taking life advice from John Donne would be a disastrous strategy. He made decisions in the moment that would ruin his life, like his marriage to Anne More. But the thing that he can tell us rings true now, quite urgently, about the need to see clearly the fact of death. The need to celebrate and embrace the body and the mind together.”
The greatest motto to take from Donne, according to Rundell, is: “Pay attention.” And it is this Donnish incitement to wonderment that infuses Rundell’s most recent book, The Golden Mole. Published after Super-Infinity, this collection of short essays celebrates endangered creatures from crows to pangolins. In one chapter, she exhorts us to scream with awe at the thought of sea horses from the moment we wake and put on our trousers to the moment we go to sleep. “I realise that, in practical terms, that would be extremely inconvenient,” she says. “But I do think the kind of iron-willed effort it takes to remain astonished by astonishment has a kind of politics to it. It requires a kind of ongoing lifelong curiosity.”
Rundell’s childhood in Zimbabwe – running barefoot in the wilds and avoiding imaginary crocodiles in rivers – makes her sound like a plucky children’s book heroine. Her father, who now works in Mali for the UN, was a civil servant, her mother a French lecturer at university. They lived in Harare until Rundell was 14. Then the family moved to Belgium, which was something of a culture shock. Up until then, Rundell spent much of her time outdoors. “It was a stroke of luck, a huge privilege to grow up in the presence of living things and the wildness of the world.”
But there was also tragedy. When she was 10, her foster sister died. Throughout her illness, books became Rundell’s refuge but they also gave her the motivation to become a writer. “I think her loss offered me a sense that life is precious and difficult. But it is very beautiful and very, very painful to be alive. I think most people realise that – I perhaps learned it younger than some.” And it is this message, for want of a better word, that she wanted to convey in her own books for children. As one of the explorers in her novel says: “You are right to be afraid. Be brave anyway.”
After graduating from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, Rundell sat the notoriously difficult All Souls exam (her essay subject was “novelty” – she plumped for writing about Jacques Derrida and Christmas crackers) and succeeded, becoming the youngest female fellow ever. Before taking up her fellowship, she had a month to kill: on the day after her 21st birthday, with a hangover, she started what would become her first novel. “I had this one month in which to just hungrily sit and write.” The result, after a year of rewriting, was The Girl Savage, which was immediately snapped up by Faber.
For many years as a fellow, Rundell followed a routine very similar to that of Iris Murdoch, who would write fiction in the morning and philosophy in the afternoon, all while holding a teaching post. Rundell would wake at four to work on her fiction – “those are wonderful hours because nobody has a call on you. Nobody is going to email you or text you” – then she would spend the day teaching, before maybe going out for a drink in the evening.
And it’s not just academically that Rundell is a high-flyer: her hobby is roof-walking. Google her and you will find a photograph of Rundell elegantly poised on the crenellated roof of All Souls. “It’s much less glamorously athletic than it sounds. It’s just a desire to see the world from up high, what is laid out in front of you.” She used to practise on a tightrope in her study and learned trapeze-flying to write Rooftoppers, which is about children living on Paris rooftops. When she visits her family in Zimbabwe, she takes flying lessons.
She is giving the Baillie Gifford prize money to charity: to Blue Ventures, an ocean-based conservation organisation, and also to a refugee charity. The reason? “No man is an island,” she says, citing that most famous of all Donne lines. Her boyfriend – film producer Charles Collier, whom she thanks in the acknowledgements as the reason “the love poetry makes sense to me” – has promised to treat her to a bottle of champagne, though.
If she had to recommend just one Donne poem for someone to start with, which would it be? “Love’s Growth,” she replies without missing a beat, then recites the opening stanza: “I scarce believe my love to be so pure …” The final “more”, she adds, is a play on his wife’s name. “So it’s one of those poems which is beautiful for all of us, but different for her.”
Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell (Faber & Faber, £16.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
