Katherine Rundell: belief

Transcript context

…What are the most important lessons of governance from what are called children’s novels? Children’s novels tend to teach the large, uncompromising truths that we hope exist. Things like love will matter, kindness will matter, equality is possible. I think that we express them as truths to children when what they really are are hopes. I suppose the best politics of children’s fiction will be those that argue that, as Ursula Le Guin would say, all that we have made, we have made by man, and it can be undone by man. That often, the first way that we transform the world is through the art that she calls her art, the art of words. She would say it is the utopianism of children’s fiction that allows us to imagine something better. She might be right. Should the rest of fiction be more like what we call children’s fiction?…

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