Noeline spotted this in the Guardian :
I don’t believe stories will protect us against Covid-19, any more than would strength of character or moral probity. The solutions lie with science and the radical global cooperation of governments, but we will need the stories, even so. Tales of transformation and of emancipation, both real and fictional, can be a set of stars and maps. They point us both towards action and hope. Real hope, I think, is not the promise that everything will be all right, but a sense that the world has so many complexities and possibilities that despair is misplaced; that we still live in a universe shot through with the unexpected. There has never been a decade when we have not taken ourselves by surprise: we have never yet exhausted our capacity for change. I struggle with optimism, but nor am I a pessimist; I tell the children I write for that I am a possibilityist. I truly believe in the potential for human transformation.
The world has so many possibilities that despair is misplaced – our universe is shot through with the unexpected
So a few weeks ago, in search of that defibrillation for the imagination that happens when the right reader meets the right story (and in truth, in part to fight back at my own sadness and fear), I emailed some of the children’s writers and artists whose work I love most. I asked them to write something, or draw something, anything, that would offer that galvanic sense of possibility even in darkness. The response was glorious, which shouldn’t have surprised me. So many children’s writers and illustrators are themselves already hunters and gatherers of hope; manufacturers and peddlers of wonder.
Now, a few weeks later, the pieces have been collected into The Book of Hopes. The stories and essays and images aren’t explicitly about hope: rather, they aim to create it, through delight or comfort or new ideas, ridiculous jokes, wild heroic tales. There are true accounts of cats and hares and plastic-devouring caterpillars, there are doodles and flowers, revolting and beautiful poems, there are stories of space travel and new shoes and dragons. They are designed to be dipped into: you can eat one with your breakfast and another at midday. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott believed that during times of privation, the imagination can be a place of shelter for children. I hope that The Book of Hopes might help, even if only a little.
The collection is a free downloadable PDF, hosted on the website of the National Literacy Trust. It’s dedicated to the doctors, nurses, carers and all those working in hospitals to protect us: they are the stuff that wild, heroic tales are made of.
• Katherine Rundell’s fee for this feature has been donated to NHS Charities Together. Her latest adventure story, The Good Thieves, is published by Bloomsbury. The Book of Hopes is available at literacytrust.org.uk.