NY Times feature on the 75th anniversary of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with several authors commenting on what it meant to them. Katherine Rundell: "Narnia thrilled me like no other place. It taught me to long for big pleasures: for enchanted landscapes and ancient truths, for redemptions and reversals. . . . I had a school friend who was so passionately in love with Mr. Tumnus that she has ever since found it hard to reconcile herself to dating adult men."
For me Narnia heightened my fascination with finding a door that I could step through into another world, which has at times in my life sharpened into pain that I could not. It was that transition that obsessed me more than the world or the stories. There were other worlds that I liked better – Middle Earth, Lloyd Alexander's Wales – but they did not come with that wonderful means of access.
For the cover of The Raven and the Crown I selected an old painting titled The Enchanted Gate.
If you wonder why I write novels despite being a busy career man and father of five, and despite getting zero encouragement from the publishing world, it is this: because in writing stories I have finally found my gate to the Other Lands.
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