Cornelia Funke

Cornelia Funke, born in 1958 in Dorsten, is a German writer of children's and young adult fiction, best known for her fantasy novels. She writes in German, though her books have been translated into many languages. In 2005 Time magazine named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world, and in Germany she has long been one of the most widely read authors among young readers.

As a child she dreamed of becoming a pilot or an astronaut, or of living with Native American peoples. She studied pedagogy and then spent three years as a social worker with children from deprived backgrounds. Those children's stories eventually pushed her toward writing. She first worked as an illustrator of children's books, but soon began writing her own.

In the late 1980s and 1990s she built her reputation in Germany with series such as Gespensterjäger, known in English as Ghosthunters. Her fiction tends toward fantasy and portrays young people facing hardship who remain, first of all, children. Her novels only began appearing in English in 2002, when the publisher Barry Cunningham, after a letter from a young bilingual reader, released them through his new imprint, The Chicken House.

Her best-known book abroad is Inkheart, the first part of a trilogy about characters who slip out of books when they are read aloud. The Thief Lord and Dragon Rider also found wide audiences, and several of her novels have been filmed. By 2012 she had sold more than twenty million copies worldwide. Her legacy lies largely in having built a large readership of young people for German fantasy fiction, and in reaching English-speaking readers in a way few German children's authors had done before.