Ungifted
Ungifted
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Gordon Korman on Ungifted
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
What a school visit revealed about one wordKorman logs thousands of miles a year visiting schools, and that accumulation of time in classrooms gave him a front-row view of how a single word reshapes a child’s identity. What he kept noticing was not just who got the label, but what it cost everyone who didn’t.
I do a lot of school visits, which is great market research. I’ve seen how the word ‘gifted’ is often kicked around. Kids who make it into those special programs are certainly proficient in some ways, but in other ways they may lag behind other kids in the school. I was wondering what would happen if a kid who was not academically gifted suddenly got thrown in that mix. Perhaps a person like Donovan could show everyone else how to have a good time and let their hair down, and get a better education than they otherwise would ever get in a gifted program.
That last clause is the book’s bet: the interloper might gain more than the program he disrupts.
The question was not only about the kids he observed. When readers at school visits ask whether he was in a gifted program himself when he wrote his first book at twelve, his answer places him squarely on Donovan’s side of the divide.
Absolutely not. I was just as ungifted as Donovan Curtis. I wrote UNGIFTED and SUPERGIFTED to play around with the idea that there’s a little bit of genius inside every kid, gifted program or no.
Writing ahead of the August 2012 release on his own site, Korman pushed the premise beyond gifted programs to make the case that Donovan’s predicament, hiding in a place where he plainly doesn’t belong, is one most readers have already lived.
Although not all of us have tried to hide out in the gifted program, pretty much everybody has been placed in a situation where we’ve had to bluff our way through, pretending to be something we’re not. So I suppose there’s a little ungiftedness inside all of us.
How he wrote it
A format built for competing points of viewThe structure of the book, where each chapter is headed by a character’s name and an IQ score and narrated in that character’s first-person voice, is something Korman did not invent for this project. By the time he brought it to bear on Donovan’s story, it was already a habit. In an interview with Ric’s Book Reviews, he placed it in a longer sequence of his own work.
Restart is like that, and Unteachables is like that, Supergifted, Ungifted, you know, I’ve been writing that way for a pretty long time. [paraphrased from audio]
Korman traces the book’s central premise to the question he returns to at the start of every project. At school visits he uses the book to demonstrate how a single ‘what if’ can generate a plot, and the answer to that question in this case delivered an outcome that surprised even him: the kid whose only credential is hundreds of hours on a video game joystick turns out to be exactly what a gifted program’s robotics team was missing.
What if the ungifted kid got sent to the gifted school by mistake. [paraphrased from audio]
The book was finished as a standalone, and Korman did not plan a sequel when it published in 2012. The series, which eventually grew to include Supergifted in 2018 and Hypergifted in 2026, followed the same path as two earlier books he had written without any intention of continuing them. In a 2025 interview, he named those precedents explicitly.
SWINDLE and THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING AT MACDONALD HALL were stand-alone novels that became series as I wrote sequels. UNGIFTED will be the next example of that.
What he wants us to sit with
Every kid has a joystick somewhereKorman is consistent about not wanting to be read as a moralist, but when he uses Donovan at school visits to land a point, the point is always the same. After describing how Donovan’s video-game-trained hands rescue the robotics team at competition, he turned the lesson outward toward the students in the room.
We all have something that’s cool. Find that, and you have a writer.
The book’s commercial life outside the United States gave him an unexpected illustration of that reach. The title, which compresses the whole premise into a single coined word, refused to travel into at least one language, even as the story itself did.
My book ‘Ungifted’ is the No. 1 kids’ book in Turkey. It’s impossible to translate that title into the Turkish language.
The word couldn’t cross the border, but the kid who doesn’t fit the label apparently could.
Donovan is not the only outsider Korman has written, and in a Scholastic interview Korman placed him inside a pattern that he sees running through much of his fiction. The remark came in a conversation about bullying and belonging sparked by Restart, but he meant it to describe a recurring preoccupation.
A lot of my message in my writing is sort of like the acceptance of the misfit and the outsider and all of our differences. And that’s where our strength comes from. [paraphrased from audio]
In a longer career retrospective recorded for the National Writing Project, Korman placed Ungifted within a run of books he considers his most successful work, a cluster that arrived, by his own accounting, well into his career rather than at the start of it.
If you look at my most successful books, the ones that are really sort of connecting with an audience, it’s all like lately: Restart and The Fort and Operation Do-Over and Ungifted and The Unteachables. A lot of my most successful things come from the last quarter of my writing career. [paraphrased from audio]