A female children’s writer with a boy hero

‘It was more difficult. I believe very fervently that we overstate gender differences, so a kid that is brave and tough, but panicked, will, in either gender, I think, act in extremis in similar ways. But I was reading about the 1920s and 1930s, and to be a boy in that period was to have demands made of you that I didn't want to blur. Fred's father wanted him to be manly...

The demands that are made of women can be ferocious, but the demands made of men can be equally tough. I don't know what it is to be a boy. I have a lot of male friends and my best friend when I was nine was a boy, but there is an extra imaginative leap you have to make, I know intricately what it means to be a girl and I don't know who gets to say whether a character is real. Do only boys get to say if a boy character is real and a girl if a girl character is?'

Katherine Rundell, author of The Explorer, which she writes about here, Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, The Wolf Wilder and The Good Thieves in The Times.