Award-winning author Katherine Rundell has criticised celebrities who use ghostwriters for children's books, arguing they fail to give "sufficient care" to the works published under their names.

The novelist, whose book Impossible Creatures won Waterstones Book Of The Year in 2023, suggested that a significant proportion of books attributed to famous individuals might be ghost-written. She estimated the figure could be "just below 50%".

“I think the thing that frustrates me most would be where people are publishing books that they have not themselves written,” she told BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life.

“Because, of course, there are many great comedians who could write great children’s fiction, I’m sure, but if you are creating a children’s book in the same way you would create a perfume or a series of steak knives, you are not giving it sufficient care.”

She added: “I think ghost-writing makes perfect sense for memoir, for non-fiction, but for fiction, when a child opens a story they should be entering a pact with you, that you will have thought of them and what they need, their desires, their drive.

“And if you break that pact, and if you flood the market with books that break that pact, you risk turning children off books.

“And to turn children off books is to turn them off the great history of ideas. Books are the place we have gone to set down our most bold and ambitious thought and to risk turning children off that, I think, is a stupidity for which we shouldn’t be forgiven.”

Asked, anecdotally, if she knows the proportion of children’s books that are ghost-written, she said: “I don’t know. A high percentage, probably less than half, but not that much less.”

Rundell won the Costa Children’s Book Award in 2017 for her book The Explorer and the Blue Peter Best Story Award in 2014 for Rooftoppers.

Her other children’s books include One Christmas Wish (2017), Skysteppers (2021), and her forthcoming book The Poisoned King, a follow-up to Impossible Creatures (2023).