Eva Maria Charlotte Michelle Ibbotson (née Wiesner; 21 January 1925 – 20 October 2010)[1] was an Austrian-born British novelist, known for her children's literature.

[7] Her mother, Anna Wilhelmine Gmeyner, was a successful novelist and playwright, who had worked with Bertolt Brecht and written film scripts for Georg Pabst.

What followed for Eva was, in her words, a "very cosmopolitan, sophisticated and quite interesting, but also very unhappy childhood, always on some train and wishing to have a home," as she later recalled.

[9] Her father took up a university lectureship in Edinburgh, while her mother left Vienna for Paris in 1933 after her work was banned by Adolf Hitler, putting a sudden end to her successful writing career.

Appalled by the thought of having to make a career out of conducting experiments on animals, she decided to discontinue her pursuit of scientific research.

[15] Her first English-language book was The Great Ghost Rescue, a juvenile fantasy novel[16] published in 1975 by Macmillan in the UK and Walck in the US, with illustrations by Simon Stern and Giulio Maestro respectively.

[17] Ibbotson wrote more than a dozen books for children, including Which Witch?, The Secret of Platform 13, Dial-a-Ghost, Monster Mission, Journey to the River Sea, The Star of Kazan, The Beasts of Clawstone Castle, and The Dragonfly Pool.

She won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for Journey to the River Sea, and was a runner up for major awards in British children's literature several times.

Ibbotson said that she disliked thinking about the supernatural, and created the characters because she wanted to decrease her readers' fear of such things.

Three are The Secret Countess (originally published as A Countess Below Stairs), A Company of Swans, and Magic Flutes (in some editions published as The Reluctant Heiress) Ibbotson's writing for adults and teens took a new direction in 1992, when she began to move toward romantic novels that dealt with the harsh realities of war and prejudice.