Eva Ibbotson

Wiesner was born in Vienna in 1925 to non-practising Jewish parents.[6] Her father, Bertold Paul Wiesner, was a physician who pioneered human infertility treatment. He is now believed to have used his own sperm to sire perhaps 600 of the children his clinic helped to be born.[7] Her mother, Anna Wilhelmine Gmeyner, was a successful novelist and playwright, who had worked with Bertolt Brecht and written film scripts for Georg Pabst.[8]

Wiesner's parents separated in 1928 when she was two years old. What followed for Eva was, in her words, a "very cosmopolitan, sophisticated and quite interesting, but also very unhappy childhood, always on some train and wishing to have a home," as she later recalled.[9] Her father took up a university lectureship in Edinburgh, while her mother left Vienna for Paris in 1933 after her work was banned by Adolf Hitler, putting a sudden end to her successful writing career.

In 1934, her mother moved to England, settling in Belsize Park, north London, and sent for her daughter. Other family members also escaped from Vienna and joined Anna and Eva Maria in England, avoiding the worst of the Nazi regime, which had already affected the family. The experience of fleeing Vienna was a strong thread throughout Ibbotson's life and work.[10]

Wiesner attended Dartington Hall School,[11] which she later fictionalised as Delderton Hall in her novel The Dragonfly Pool (2008). Originally, she intended to become a physiologist like her father, and earned an undergraduate degree from Bedford College, London, in 1945. During her postgraduate studies at Cambridge University, she met her future husband, Alan Ibbotson, an ecologist.[12]

Eva married Alan Ibbotson in 1947.[12] They moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne,[13] where they raised a family of three sons and a daughter.

Appalled by the thought of having to make a career out of conducting experiments on animals, she decided to discontinue her pursuit of scientific research.[12] She returned to college, graduating with a diploma in education in 1965 from the University of Durham. She briefly became a teacher in the 1960s before embarking on her writing career.

Ibbotson's husband died in 1998. Being "too sad to write in her usual humorous style", she then wrote her ecological classic Journey to the River Sea.[14] She died at her home in Newcastle on 20 October 2010, having just edited the proofs of her last children's book, One Dog and his Boy, and started work on another children's ghost story to add to her long and successful series.

Through her father, Ibbotson was half-sister of the writer Paul Newham and the Canadian filmmaker Barry Stevens, but never met them.

Eva Ibbotson began writing with the television drama Linda Came Today, which the British "Television Playhouse" series broadcast in December 1962.[15] Her first English-language book was The Great Ghost Rescue, a juvenile fantasy novel[16] published in 1975 by Macmillan in the UK and Walck in the US, with illustrations by Simon Stern and Giulio Maestro respectively.[17]

Critics have found similarities between Ibbotson's "Platform 13" in The Secret of Platform 13 (1994) and J.K. Rowling's "Platform 9 3/4" in the Harry Potter books (from 1997), both set in King's Cross station in London. The journalist Amanda Craig has discussed the similarities: "Ibbotson would seem to have at least as good a case for claiming plagiarism as the American author currently suing J. K. Rowling but unlike her, Ibbotson says she would 'like to shake her (Rowling) by the hand. I think we all borrow from each other as writers.'"[18]

• Best Romantic Novel of the Year Published in England, Romantic Novelists Association, 1983, Magic Flutes
• Carnegie Medal

shortlist 1978, Which Witch?

shortlist 2001, Journey to the River Sea;

shortlist 2005, The Star of Kazan

• Best Books designation, School Library Journal, 1998, The Secret of Platform 13
• Nestle Smarties Book Prize

shortlist 1998, The Secret of Platform 13

winner 2001, ages 9–11 years, Journey to the River Sea

silver medal 2004, 9–11 years, The Star of Kazan

• Whitbread Children's Book of the Year, 2001 shortlist, Journey to the River Sea
• Guardian Children's Fiction Prize

highly commended runner up 2001, Journey to the River Sea[2]

shortlist 2010, The Ogre of Oglefort 28 May 17 Sep

shortlist 2012, The Abominables [4][5]

• Ibbotson wrote Linda Came Today (1962) for television
• In 1978, she wrote Der Große Karpfen Ferdinand und andere Weihnachtsgeschichten for German television.
• In 2004 Enda Walsh was adapting Island of the Aunts for a feature film.[19]
• A film adaptation of The Great Ghost Rescue was completed in 2011, directed by the French Yann Samuell.[20]
• The Haunting of Hiram C. Hopgood was adapted by Gail Gilchriest.[21]

• Eva Ibbotson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Eva Ibbotson at IMDb
• "Author of the month: Eva Ibbotson" (August 2004), The Guardian
• Penguin Reading Guide: Eva Ibbotson.
• Ibbotson: "Ich brauche ein glückliches Ende" (2006), a German-language radio interview
• Eva Ibbotson at Library of Congress, with 33 library catalogue records