Katherine Rundell

When I write, I write for two people: myself, age twelve, and myself, now, and the book has to satisfy two distinct but connected appetites.

So what I try for when I write – failing often, but trying – is to put down in as few words as I can the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember.

Those who write for children are trying to arm them for the life ahead with everything we can find that is true. And perhaps, also, secretly, to arm adults against those necessary compromises and necessary heartbreaks that life involves: to remind them that there are and always will be great, sustaining truths to which we can return.

For reading not to become something that we do for anxious self-optimisation – for it not to be akin to buying high-spec trainers and a gym membership each January – all texts must be open, to all people.

I’m interested, here, in the texts for children that acknowledge the right of the child to have as rich a story as the adult writing it would demand for themselves.

What is it like to read as a child? Is there something in it – the headlong, hungry, immersive quality of it – that we can get back to?

Marina Warner argues that fairytales are the closest thing we have to a cultural Esperanto: whether German, Persian, American, we tell the same fairytales, because the stories have migrated across borders as freely as birds.

Fairytales conjure fear in order to tell us that we need not be so afraid.

They provide us with a model for how certain kinds of stories – by dealing in archetypes and bass-note human desires, and in metaphors with bite – can yoke together people of every age and background, luring us all, witch-like, into the same imaginative space.

Fairytales are also a way of tracing our cultural evolution. More than any other kind of story, they live and breathe and change.