Private Passions

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Private Passions Podcast

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Katherine Rundell

Michael Berkeley’s guest is writer Katherine Rundell.

Michael Berkeley’s guest is writer Katherine Rundell. With music by Bach, Strauss, Miles Davis, Fauré and Mozart.

Katherine Rundell started writing for children at the age of only 21; in little more than a decade she’s become one of our leading children’s writers, with six books so far, including the award-winning Rooftoppers, the story of a girl who travels across the rooftops of Paris looking for her mother. Katherine herself is a roof climber and a tightrope walker. 

Born in 1987, she grew up in Zimbabwe and Brussels; after taking her undergraduate degree at Oxford, she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College where she wrote her PhD thesis on John Donne. Her book on that great metaphysical poet, Super-infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, was published earlier this year, to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the poet’s birth. 

Katherine Rundell tells Michael Berkeley that her books set out to explain to children that life does contain loss, and pain, and darkness, but that it is always possible to discover joy. Her own childhood was marked by the loss of her sister and she says it is no accident that she lost her sister when she herself was ten and that she writes for ten-year-olds now. She talks too about her love of tightrope-walking and roof-climbing, and about her passion for John Donne, choosing two musical settings of his work. Other music choices include Mozart, Bach, Strauss, Fauré and Miles Davis.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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