Eva Ibbotson

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Eva Ibbotson (born Maria Charlotte Michelle Wiesner, 1925, Vienna, Austria) is a novelist specializing in juvenile fiction.

She has written numerous books including The Secret of Platform 13, Journey to the River Sea, Which Witch?, Island of the Aunts, and Dial-a-Ghost. She has previously been nominated for the Smarties book prize and the Whitbread prize. The books are imaginative and humorous, and most of them feature 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. Some of the books, particularly Journey to the River Sea, also reflect Ibbotson's love of nature. Ibbotson wrote this book in honor of her husband(who had died just before she wrote it), a former naturalist. The book had been in her head for years before she actually wrote it. Ibbotson said she dislikes "financial greed and a lust for power" and often creates antagonists in her books who have these characteristics. Her book The Secret of Platform 13 is found by some very similar to the Harry Potter books' Platform 9 3/4, although it is important to note that Ibbotson was writing before Rowling.

She was born in Vienna, which she called "a very beautiful city ringed by green hills, and a wonderful place for music and theatre," and moved frequently across Europe from one parent to the other, as the couple was not happy together. Her mother was a playwright and her father a scientist. Finally she moved with her father to England when the Nazis came to power, followed by her mother after a remarriage with a Russian philosopher, and attended progresive boarding school there. Later, she received a degree in Physiology at London University, and then did experiments on animals at Cambridge University, before realizing she disliked experimenting on them. She now lives in Newcastle Upon Tyne, where she has raised a daughter and three sons with her husband Alan Ibbotson, who was a fellow student of hers at university, and who once told her to neglect her animal experiments. Ibbotson's husband died before she wrote Journey to the River Sea. She is still writing as of 2005.