As a meditation on 'love, sex and death'” as the book’s jacket copy has it, and as a guide to how John Donne’s mind worked, Super-Infinite is a wonder. Instead she ransacks his poetry and prose for insight into the man himself. There is little analysis of his artistic influences, and less of his posthumous reputation. Rundell does not attempt a feminist defense of Donne’s love poetry.she adores much of it despite any reservations. Super-Infinite hardly reads like an academic work. Super-Infinite is an attempt to crack Donne’s code. And looking ahead to the best books of next year, Mo Hafeez, editor at Faber and Faber, shares his enthusiasm for Kathryn Scanlan’s novel Kick the Latch, in bookshops from January.Erudite, entertaining. Domhildur's exploring her grand aunt's collection of philosophical essays, from the local history of midwifery to the encroaching impact of climate change, which circle around the delicate equilibrium of life. It’s told through the eyes of Domhildur, a midwife who has just delivered her one thousand nine hundred and twenty-second baby in the days before Christmas as a deadly storm approaches the island.

Her latest novel Animal Life, translated by Brian FitzGibbon, blends themes of the natural and human worlds as surprisingly as The Golden Mole. Katherine also shares her favourite fictonal stories about animals, including a reading from The Sheep Pig by Dick King-Smith.Īlso exploring the fragility of our natural world, Chris talks to the Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. Exploring how she blended art and science, poetry and natural history through writings from Pliny, Aristotle, TS Eliot, Hemingway, Russian fairy tales and Greek mythology to inspire her readers about the beauty of the natural world and the fragility of its existence. Katherine talks to Chris Power today about The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasures, a collection of impassioned essays on the world's endangered animals.

She also published The Zebra’s Great Escape, one of many children’s books she’s written which include her award winning The Explorers and Rooftoppers.

It’s been a prolific year for The Golden Mole’s author, Katherine Rundell, who last month became the youngest ever winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for Super-Infinite, her biography of the Renaissance poet John Donne.

Rundell super infinite