Meet the author

Cornelia Funke.

Writer · Germany · b. 1958

Cornelia Funke: the German master of immersive, fairy-tale-dark fantasy whose Inkworld books turn the love of reading into the most powerful and perilous magic of all.

Cornelia Funke (born 1958) is a German author of richly imagined fantasy for older children and teenagers, and one of the most successful children's writers of her generation. She trained as an illustrator before turning to writing, and won international acclaim with The Thief Lord and Dragon Rider. Her signature achievement is the Inkworld sequence — Inkheart, Inkspell, Inkdeath and the later The Colour of Revenge — a bibliophile's fantasy in which characters can be read out of books and into the real world, and readers into the story. Steeped in fairy-tale atmosphere and deepening in darkness across the series, her Inkworld novels move from a bookish adventure into weighty, emotionally intense territory best suited to confident readers. Lush, suspenseful and unafraid of grief, Funke writes the kind of long, immersive fantasy that devoted readers disappear into.