| Eva Ibbotson is the
author of many magical adventures. With their fantastic creatures,
outrageous characters, quirky humour, and brilliant storytelling,
her books appeal to all readers - including fans of Roald Dahl and
Harry Potter. She has experienced tremendous success over the years,
and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal with Which Witch?
the Smarties Prize with The Secret of Platform 13 and the 2001 Blue
Peter Book Award in the Book I Couldn't Put Down category with Monster
Mission. Her novel, Journey to the River Sea, was runner-up in the
Guardian Children's Fiction Award, shortlisted for the Whitbread
Children’s Book of the Year Award, won the Nestle Smarties
Prize and has also been selected as a top 20 ‘brilliant book’
to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this award. The Star of Kazan
published in July 2004 and received the silver award in the Nestle
Smarties Prize 2004 and is shortlisted for the 2004 Carnegie Medal.
‘I was born in
Vienna, in Austria – a very beautiful city ringed by green
hills, and a wonderful place for music and the theatre.
But when the Nazis seized
power, my family fled to England, where I was sent to boarding school
and soon became extremely British!
After trying to be a
physiologist (which didn’t work because I didn’t like
doing experiments on animals) I got married and had four very nice
children: a daughter and three sons who are now grown up.
And I started to write.
Writers are often set
off by quite small things. Many years ago, a friend came to our
house who had been travelling in Brazil and he told me that a thousand
miles from the mouth of the Amazon river, in a city called Manaus,
there was a fantastic opera house with grass growing through cracks
in the stone and howler monkeys screeching on the roof.
I immediately felt that
little kick inside the head which means that you have found something
that is yours. For years I researched that part of the world. I
learnt about the ‘rubber barons’ who went out at the
beginning of the century to harvest the rubber trees which grew
wild in the forest, and who became so rich that they could send
their shirts back to Europe to be laundered, and wash their carriage
horses in champagne. It was they who built Manaus and sent for famous
actors and dancers and singers across the sea to perform in their
beautiful opera house. Yet all the time the untamed jungle was on
the doorstep, waiting to take over if they failed…
Meanwhile I wrote books
for children about wizards and witches and harpies and ghosts –
and books for adults about all sorts of things.
But my interest
in the exotic world of the Amazon never left me. Journey to the
River Sea is my attempt to share this world with you.’
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