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.”
