Eva Ibbotson


Eva Maria Charlotte Michelle Ibbotson, more commonly known as Eva Ibbotson, was an Austrian-born British novelist, known for her children's books. Some of her novels for adults have been successfully reissued for the young adult market in recent years.
For the historical novel Journey to the River Sea, she won the Smarties Prize in category 9–11 years, garnered unusual commendation as runner up for the Guardian Prize, and made the Carnegie, Whitbread, and Blue Peter shortlists.
She was a finalist for the 2010 Guardian Prize at the time of her death. Her last book, The Abominables, was one of four finalists for the same award in 2012.

Personal life

Wiesner was born in Vienna in 1925 to non-practising Jewish parents. 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. Her mother, Anna Wilhelmine Gmeyner, was a successful novelist and playwright, who had worked with Bertolt Brecht and written film scripts for Georg Pabst.
Wiesner's parents separated in 1928 when she was three 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. Her father took up a university lectureship in Edinburgh, while her mother left Vienna for Paris in 1933 after her work was banned by 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.
Wiesner attended Dartington Hall School, which she later fictionalised as Delderton Hall in her novel The Dragonfly Pool. 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.

Marriage and family

Eva married Alan Ibbotson in 1947. They moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne where they raised their family of three sons and a daughter.
Finding the thought of having to make a career out of conducting experiments on animals appalling, she decided to discontinue her pursuit of a career in scientific research. Ibbotson 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, making her "too sad to write in her usual humorous style", and she then wrote her ecological classic Journey to the River Sea. She died at her home in Newcastle on 20 October 2010, having just completed editing the proofs of her last children's book, One Dog and his Boy, and starting work on another ghost story to add to her long and successful series of children's ghost stories.
Through her father, Ibbotson was the half-sister of writer Paul Newham and Canadian filmmaker Barry Stevens. She never met them.

Career

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

Children's books

Ibbotson wrote more than a dozen books for children, including Which Witch?, The Secret of Platform 13, Dial-a-Ghost, Monster Mission, Journey to the River Sea, The Star of Kazan, The Beasts of Clawstone Castle, and The Dragonfly Pool. She won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for Journey to the River Sea, and has been a runner up for major awards in British children's literature several times. WorldCat libraries report holding Which Witch? and Journey to the River Sea in more than five and ten languages, respectively.
The books are imaginative and humorous, and most of them feature magical creatures and places. Ibbotson has said that she disliked thinking about the supernatural, and created the characters because she wanted to decrease her readers' fear of such things. Some of the books, particularly Journey to the River Sea, also reflect Ibbotson's love of nature. She wrote Journey in honour of her husband, a former naturalist who had just died; the book had been in her head for years. Ibbotson had said she disliked "financial greed and a lust for power", and often created antagonists in her books who have these characteristics.
Her love of Austria is evident in works such as The Star of Kazan, A Song for Summer and Magic Flutes/The Reluctant Heiress. These books, set primarily in the Austrian countryside, display the author's love of nature.

Adult books

Ibbotson was also noted for several works of fiction for adults. Several have been reissued successfully for the young-adult market, some under different titles. Ibbotson was surprised by the repackaging, as she believed they were books for adults, but they have been very popular with teenage audiences. Three are The Secret Countess, A Company of Swans, and Magic Flutes
Ibbotson's writing for adults and teens took a new direction in 1992, when she began to move away from romantic novels. Two of her acclaimed books are set in Europe at the time of World War II and reflect her experience of the time. The first of this setting, The Morning Gift, became a best-seller. Her last novel for adults was A Song for Summer, also set during World War II.

''The Secret of Platform 13'' and ''Harry Potter''

Critics have observed similarities between Ibbotson's "Platform 13" in The Secret of Platform 13 and J.K. Rowling's "Platform 9 3/4" in the Harry Potter books, both located at King's Cross station in London. The journalist Amanda Craig has written about 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 by the hand. I think we all borrow from each other as writers'."

Published works

German language

These translations were published as small books in Switzerland.
Best Romantic Novel of the Year Published in England, Romantic Novelists Association, 1983, Magic Flutes
Carnegie Medal
Best Books designation, School Library Journal, 1998, The Secret of Platform 13
Nestle Smarties Book Prize
Whitbread Children's Book of the Year, 2001 shortlist, Journey to the River Sea
Guardian Children's Fiction Prize

Film and television