EVA IBBOTSON

MARIA CHARLOTTE MICHELLE WIESNER

BRITISH NOVELIST(romance & children’s fantasy)

Born: Vienna, Austria on January 21, 1925

Spouse: Alan Ibbotson (1947-1998)
Parents: Anna Gmeyner (Novelist and Playwright) & Berthold/Bernard Wiesner (Scientist/Pioneer of
Human Artificial Insemination)
Children: Lalage Bosanquet, Toby Ibbotson, Justin Ibbotson, Piers Ibbotson
Education: Bedford College 1945
Cambridge University 1946-47
University of Durham 1965

FACTS

- She dislikes financial greed and a lust for power (she often creates antagonists in her books who have
these characteristics)

- She intended to be a Physiologist but was put off by the amount of animal testing that she would
have to do. Instead, she married and raised a family, returning to school to become a teacher in the
1960.

- She won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for JTTRS in category 9-11 years garnered an 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.

+. The story JTTRS reflects her love for nature

+. She honours the book for her husband (former naturalist) who had just died – 1998 – before she
wrote it.

- Some of her novels for adults have been reissued for the young adult market.

- Her love for Austria is evident in works such as (The Star of Kazan and A Song For Summer) these
books, set primarily in the Austrian Countryside.

- Her books are imaginative and numerous. Most of them features magical creatures and places,
despite the fact that she disliked thinking about the supernatural, and created the characters because
she wanted to decrease her readers’ fear of such things.

- She died peacefully at home, aged 85

BACKGROUND

Eva grew up in a ‘Bohemian, left wing family… at the centre of the Viennese intelligensia’. Her parents separated early and Eva’s
childhood in Vienna and from 1933 on, when Hitler came into power, her Jewish family moved to England, was spent being
shuttled between their homes and those of her older relatives on the continent and later between Edinburgh and London. It was
a time when she felt ‘displaced… lost… always looking for a home’. She found a ‘home’ of sorts at Dartington Hall, the newly
founded progressive school, which she attended for eight years – a place filled, she recalled, with a heady mix of ‘idealism,
idiocy, wealth and amazing good teaching’.

After taking a degree in physiology at London University, she met her husband, Alan Ibbotson, an ecologist, at Cambridge
University where she was engaged in post-graduate research. Marriage brought Eva the security and home that she had always
longed for and with it, a new understanding of the need to live in harmony with the natural world. As her daughter and three
sons grew up, and she and Alan settled in Newcastle where Alan had taken a job at the university in 1960, she turned to writing
and discovered that she had a talent for composing short stories for women’s magazines.

The creative roots of Eva’s subsequent works – however light, humorous or fantastical they might be – lie in her past and a
delightfully wild imagination. Her characters – be they dispossessed ghosts, worried witches, or orphaned, mistreated or
unappreciated children – long, as she did, to find a home and an adult who will recognize their worth and uniqueness. Her
stories, like fairy tales or the books of Frances Hodgson Burnett and L M Montgomery that sustained her both as a child and an
adult, ‘must have happy endings’. ‘I can’t imagine,’ she said, ‘what you’d have to pay me to write an unhappy ending. I just want
to reassure people and reassure myself. I want my characters to find love and safety.’

Her contemporary fantasies with their supernatural casts – often told in an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek voice – examine serious
issues beneath their humorous surfaces. A respect for difference is all pervasive as is a concern for the natural world and the
environment. In The Great Ghost Rescue, for instance, a national ghost refuge must be found for spirits whose haunts have been
reclaimed and gentrified, a theme pursued in The Haunting of Hiram C Hopgood (1987) and Dial a Ghost (1996), while in
Monster Mission (1999), an unusual rescue operation is mounted to save mermaids and other sea creatures from having their
home turned into a theme park. Set deep in the jungles near the fabled city of Manaus on the Amazon River in Brazil, this ‘old
fashioned, homespun, Cinderella-like adventure – a new departure for Eva – follows orphaned Maia to a new home near Manaus
and an exotic, sometimes sinister, cast whose fates are determined by their response to the jungle.
If Eva espoused living in harmony with nature, she was quick to poke fun at outrageous behaviour. Characters – often villains –
who are greedy, snobs, pompous or who misuse and abuse power come to suitably sticky ends. Beauty competitions, fraudsters,
even politicians are in her line of fire: Margaret Thatcher makes a cameo appearance in The Secret of Platform 13 as a harpy
with a handbag. Stories, Eva thought, should be reassuring entertainments – filled with humour and wit.

Eva was modest, sometimes self-deprecating, about her craft. She once told me: ‘If there was an epitaph on my tombstone, it
would say: She took trouble. Not: She was a great writer but: She took trouble’ with her writing. She loved the ‘sheer beauty’ of
the English language – first discovered in the Hampstead Library as a child where books became her way into England and
Englishness. She wrote with a sense of ‘being chosen by the words rather than choosing the words’ herself. In 2004, she placed
many of her manuscripts and typescripts in the newly developing collection of the ‘work-in-progress’ of British children’s authors
and illustrators held at Seven Stories in Newcastle, the first museum in the UK to collect and celebrate this nationally important
art form.

Eva was surprised when Journey to the River Sea brought her widespread acclaim and she began to be seen as a ‘national
treasure’. She was equally surprised when the Harry Potter phenomenon propelled her books onto the best seller lists in America
and last spring, into the White House when President Barack Obama bought Journey to the River Sea for his daughters. Despite
suffering from the debilitating auto-immune disease lupus, Eva wrote and was brimful of new ideas for books until the day before
she died – leaving readers with one more story to discover – One Dog and His Boy – to be published by her great friend and
editor Marion Lloyd at Scholastic in 2011.
For a writer who continually explored our need for home, her books have found her a place in homes across Europe, Asia and the
English speaking world.

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SOME OF HER WORKS

 First Novel: The Great Ghost Rescue

 Magic Flutes (1982) - She won the Romantic Novelists' association

 Journey to the River Sea (2001)

 A Countess Below Stairs (1981)
 The Secret of Platform 13 (1994) - Children's book
 Which Witch (1979)
 A Company of Swans (1985)
 The Star of Kazan (1999) - Children's book
 Island of the Aunts (1999)
 The Reluctant Heiress (1982)
 The Morning Gift (1993)
 A Song For Summer (1997)
 The Dragonfly Pool (2008)
 Dial-A-Ghost (1996)
 One Dog and His Boy (2011)
 The Great Ghost Rescue (1975)
 The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (2005)
 Not just a Witch (1989)
 The Haunting of Granite Falls (1987)
 The Abominables (2012) – Eva's last book, was among the four finalists for the same award in
2012, and has been a runner up for many of major awards for British Children's literature.
 Madensky Square (1988)
 The Ogre of Oglefort (2010) - was shortlisted for 2010 Guardian Children's Prize
 A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories (1984)
 The Worm and the Toffee-Nosed Princess
Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie
 Monster Mission
 The Secret Countess
 The Haunting of Hiram C. Hopgood
 Mountwood School for Ghosts

 First Novel: The Great Ghost Rescue

 Magic Flutes (1982) - She won the Romantic Novelists' association

 Journey to the River Sea (2001)

 A Countess Below Stairs (1981)
 The Secret of Platform 13 (1994) - Children's book
 Which Witch (1979)
 A Company of Swans (1985)
 The Star of Kazan (1999) - Children's book
 Island of the Aunts (1999)
 The Reluctant Heiress (1982)
 The Morning Gift (1993)
 A Song For Summer (1997)
 The Dragonfly Pool (2008)
 Dial-A-Ghost (1996)
 One Dog and His Boy (2011)

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  The Great Ghost Rescue (1975)
 The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (2005)
 Not just a Witch (1989)
 The Haunting of Granite Falls (1987)
 The Abominables (2012) – Eva's last book, was among the four finalists for the same award in
2012, and has been a runner up for many of major awards for British Children's literature.
 Madensky Square (1988)
 The Ogre of Oglefort (2010) - was shortlisted for 2010 Guardian Children's Prize
 A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories (1984)
 The Worm and the Toffee-Nosed Princess
Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie
 Monster Mission
 The Secret Countess
 The Haunting of Hiram C. Hopgood
 Mountwood School for Ghosts