Cornelia Funke

Cornelia Funke is a German children's and YA author whose Inkheart trilogy — about a man whose reading aloud brings fictional characters to life — has been translated into thirty-seven languages and made her the bestselling German-language children's author of her generation.

Cornelia Funke worked as a social worker and book illustrator before becoming one of Germany’s most successful children’s authors. Her early books — The Thief Lord, Dragon Rider — were bestsellers in Germany before their English translations reached international audiences. Inkheart (2003) is her most widely known work: a novel about Mortimer “Mo” Folchart, a bookbinder with the unusual ability to bring fictional characters to life when he reads aloud. The premise — that books contain worlds as real as our own, and that a certain kind of reader can breach the boundary between them — speaks directly to the experience of being genuinely lost in a book.

Inkspell and Inkdeath complete the trilogy, extending the world into a darker and more complex territory as the boundary between the real world and the fictional world of Inkheart becomes increasingly permeable. The books are self-consciously about the power and danger of fiction — they are in the tradition of stories about stories — and they reward the kind of reader who has felt literature as a physical world.

The Mirrorworld series, beginning with Reckless (2010), draws on fairy tale rather than fantasy novel traditions. Funke has also published numerous shorter books for younger readers. She lives in California and has been a vocal advocate for the value of reading fiction for children. The Inkheart trilogy in particular has been successful in school settings as a text that articulates what reading can be, for readers who are already experiencing it.