Catherine Rundell

And I think one of the best ways to make people want to protect a thing is to make them fall headlong in love with it.

So all of the things that I did in the Amazon, like swimming with pink wild river dolphins and catching piranha to eat for dinner, I put it all in the story in the hope that children would want it for themselves and would therefore want to cherish the world in which it's possible.

Absolutely.

So I wanted it to be a story that acknowledged the way that we used to treat the world, the way that especially in Britain, we used to stride through the world as if it were our property and lay down flags as if that meant that we were now larger and more important than it.

We're slightly familiar with that here.

Yes, yes, I can imagine.

And I wanted it to be a book that shows the colossal damage that was done by empire, but not in a lecturing way.

I just wanted to see, for children to see, you can do harm, you can do great harm, but you can also do great good.

So I think one of the writers who was most influential when I was growing up is a writer who isn't nearly famous enough.

She's called Diana Wooden-Jones.

She wrote Howl's Moving Castle, which was a Studio Ghibli film.

And the thing that she does is she writes magic, but she writes it with such irony and flair and sarcasm and wit that it never becomes preposterous or sentimental.

It just has this power.

bursting energy and the thing that i love most about her is that she refuses to talk down to her audience so she treats children like they have every bit as much intelligence and flair and desire as adults and for that i will always love her what would you put next to that book

I think next to that would have to go Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, which when I read it, it was a sort of explosion.

It was showing what can be done with children's fiction.

He doesn't see it as a limit.

He sees it as an expanding possibility.

You know, he uses children's fiction to talk about everything, about God, about sex, about hope.

And I think he does it like no one else has ever done it.