Eva Ibbotson

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Eva Maria Charlotte Ibbotson (née Wiesner), also known as Eva Ibbotson (21 January 1925 – 20 October 2010), was an Austrian-born British novelist best known for her children's books.

In recent years, some of her adult novels have been reissued for the young adult market. She received the Smarties Award in category 9–11 years, received extraordinary recognition as runner up for the Guardian Prize, and made the Carnegie, Whitbread, and Blue Peter shortlists for the historical novel Journey to the River Sea (Macmillan, 2001). At the time of her death, she was a finalist for the 2010 Guardian Prize.

The Abominables, her last book, 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. Bertold Paul Wiesner, her father, was a doctor who pioneered human infertility treatment. He is now thought to have sired about 600 of the children whose clinic helped to be born. Anna Wilhelmine Gmeyner, a successful novelist and playwright who had worked with Bertolt Brecht and wrote film scripts for Georg Pabst.

Wiesner's parents divorced in 1928 when she was three years old. Eva's next move was a "very cosmopolitan, sophisticated and very sad childhood, but also very sad," she recalled later, with every train and a desire to have a home. Her father stayed in Edinburgh, while her mother left Vienna for Paris in 1933, putting an end to her promising writing career.

Her mother migrated to England in 1934, settling in Belsize Park, north London, and sending her daughter. Other family members of Vienna and Anna Maria in England also survived the Nazi period, avoiding the worst of the Holocaust, which had already affected the family. Throughout Ibbotson's life and work, the experience of fleeing Vienna was a strong thread.

Wiesner's first attendance at Dartington Hall School, which she later referred to as Delderton Hall in her book The Dragonfly Pool (2008). She aspired to become a physiologist like her father and received an undergraduate degree from Bedford College, London, in 1945. Alan Ibbotson, an ecologist, met her future husband while attending Cambridge University's postgraduate studies.

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Career

Eva Ibbotson started writing in December 1962 as part of the British "Reality Playhouse" series. The Great Ghost Rescue, a juvenile fantasy book published by Macmillan in the United Kingdom and Walck in 1975, with illustrations by Simon Stern and Giulio Maestro respectively.

Ibbotson wrote more than a dozen books for children, including Which Witch?, Dial-a-Ghost, Journey to the River Sea, The Beasts of Clawstone Castle, and The Dragonfly Pool. She received the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for Journey to the River Sea, and she has been a runner up for several major awards in British children's literature many times. According to the WorldCat libraries, Which Witch is the most popular? In more than five and ten languages, respectively, a journey to the River Sea began.

The books are both whimsical and amusing, and the bulk of them feature magical animals and places. Ibbotson has said she disliked reading about the supernatural and created the stories in order to reduce her readers' apprehensions of such things. Any of the books, particularly Journey to the River Sea, evoke Ibbotson's love of nature. Journey in honor of her husband, a former naturalist who had just died; the book had been in her head for years. Ibbotson had written about "financial envy and a lust for power," and she had often developed antagonists in her books that have these characteristics.

In paintings such as The Star of Kazan, A Song for Summer, and Magic Flutes/The Reluctant Heiress, her love of Austria is evident. These books, which are mainly set in the Austrian countryside, reveal the author's obsession with nature.

Ibbotson was also known for several works of fiction for adults. Several have been reissued with a few of them being issued with different names, some of whom have been published in the young-adult market. Ibbotson was taken aback by the repackaging, as she expected they were meant for adults, but teen audiences have been extremely interested. Three of the three Countess (originally published as A Countes Below Stairs), A Company of Swans, and Magic Flutes (in some editions titled The Reluctant Heiress) were among the three key figures.

In 1992, Ibbotson's writing for adults and teens took a new turn, as she began to shift toward romantic books that dealt with the harsh realities of war and xigmanism. Two of her best books are set in Europe at the time of World War II and reflect her time in the period. The Morning Gift (1993), the first of this setting, became a best-seller. A Song for Summer (1997), her last book for adults set during World War II.

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Awards

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