SOURCE CITATION
"Cornelia Funke." Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 68. Thomson Gale, 2006.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photograph provided by Scholastic, Inc.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Cornelia Funke is the author of numerous books for children, and in her native Germany young readers have ranked her as the most popular children's book writer after J. K. Rowling and R. L. Stine. When The Thief Lord, the first of Funke's books to be translated into English, was released in England it sold out in ten days, and in the United States, the book reached number two on the New York Times children's bestseller list. Interestingly, The Thief Lord was edited by Barry Cunningham, the man who recognized Rowling's talent and published her "Harry Potter" series in England. Funke is also the author of the acclaimed novel Inkheart and its sequel, Inkspell, as well as numerous picture books, among them The Princess Knight.
Funke grew up in the small town of Dorsten, in northern Germany. A talented but somewhat lazy student, she displayed an early interest in writing and literature. Her favorite subject was English, and she enjoyed penning long essays. Her family also placed a great emphasis on both the oral and written word. "My grandmother told stories; she was very good at that," Funke commented in an online chat hosted by Scholastic.com. "And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts." Funke had no plans to become a children's author, however; she first studied education and spent three years as a social worker. As she told an interviewer for BookBrowse.com, "I think I wanted to make the world a better place, but I found out that you can't live against your gifts. And my gifts are writing and drawing. I nevertheless learned very much about children, when I worked as a social worker. I still have the greatest respect for the ones I met in those years--and they all had bad, bad things to deal with, and did it so bravely."
From Illustrator to Author
Funke also had a talent for drawing, and she entered the publishing industry as an illustrator. She eventually turned to writing because, as she remarked on the Scholastic.com chat, "I was bored as an illustrator. I decided to write my own stories so I could draw the pictures I wanted to draw." She published more than forty works and was well known in Germany when she had her self-illustr
The Thief Lord follows orphaned brothers Prosper, aged twelve, and Boniface or "Bo," aged five, as they run away when their childless aunt and uncle decide that they only want the younger boy. Before she died, the boys' mother had described to them the wonders of Venice, Italy, and that city becomes their destination when they flee Hamburg, Germany. The boys' insensitive relatives hire private detective Victor Getz to find Bo. A Kirkus Reviews contributor felt that "the magical city of Venice, with its moonlit waters, maze of canals, and magnificent palaces, is an excellent setting" for Funke's "spellbinding story."
Prosper and Bo find refuge in an abandoned movie theater, where they live with other street children, including Scipio and Hornet. Their hideout is fitted with blankets and mattresses, and there are kittens to be petted and comic books and paperbacks to be read. Twelve-year-old Scipio, is living a dual life; he is the Thief Lord, a boy who steals from the rich to support this band of pickpockets and petty thieves and who wears a mask and boots that give him the appearance of a Robin Hood-like figure. New York Times Book Review contributor Rebecca Pepper Sinkler called the girl Hornet "a Wendy for the twenty-first century, she rides herd on the lost boys but doesn't do their laundry." While Scipio usually deals in jewels, which he sells to a fence, he accepts a job to steal a broken wooden wing from a carved lion. The lion is part of a magic carousel that has the power to change children into adults and adults into children. Photographer Ida Spavento, who owns the wing, agrees to give it up as long as the children keep her involved in finding the carousel. Meanwhile, Victor, who begins as an agent of the aunt and uncle, soon finds himself drawn to the plight of the children.
School Library Journal critic John Peters called The Thief Lord "a compelling tale, rich in ingenious twists, with a setting and cast that will linger in readers' memories," while Sinkler maintained that "what lifts this radiant novel beyond run-of-the-mill fantasy is its palpable respect for both the struggle to grow up and the mixed blessings of growing old." Anita L. Burkam wrote in Horn Book that The Thief Lord has a "sweet and comforting conclusion that will satisfy readers whose hearts have been touched" by the characters.
Speaking to Jean Westmoore of the Buffalo News, Funke explained how she chose the names Prosper and Bo for her characters: "I always take my time to find fitting names for my characters. Sometimes they step up in my imagination and tell me their names, but for Prosper and Bo I searched for their names in a name dictionary. I always know when I hit the right one. The sound clicks in my mind--and for Prosper I liked the idea, that his name means 'the lucky one,' though when we meet him he definitely is not--so it sounds like a promise."
The Magic of Reading
Guardian reviewer Diana Wynne Jones called Funke's next English-language translation, Inkheart, "a book about books, a celebration of and a warning about books," and added: "I don't think I've ever read anything that conveys so well the joys, terrors, and pitfalls of reading." While Jones felt that some of the characters are not as complete as they might be, she noted that each of the chapters begins with a quotation from a classic children's book, including Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. While the quotes have little to do with the content of the chapters, as Jones noted, they "work more as a rich sample of the books that lie behind Inkheart."
The protagonist of Inheart is a girl named Meggie, who lives with her bookbinder father, Mo, a man with a special gift, or curse. When Mo reads aloud, the characters from a book are drawn into the real world and replaced with real-world people. Nine years earlier, as Mo read Fenoglio's book titled Inkheart, characters were released, including the evil Capricorn, and Meggie's mother disappeared into the book. Meggie begins to understand the complexity of the chain of events with the arrival of a stranger named Dustfinger, who refers to Mo as Silvertongue and who now wants her father to read a monster out of the story to be used against Capricorn's enemies. School Library Journal reviewer Sharon Rawlins concluded that Inkheart's "'story within a story' will delight not just fantasy fans, but all readers who like an exciting plot with larger-than-life characters." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel "a true feast for anyone who has ever been lost in a book."
Inkspell takes place one year after the conclusion of Inkheart. After Dustfinger is read back into the Inkworld, he is followed by Meggie and her fellow apprentice Farid. An enigmatic figure named Orpheus appears to control their fates, and Meggie appeals to Fenoglio, the author of the original Inkheart, to help them. In Inkspell, the author "delivers more than enough action, romance, tragedy, villainy and emotion to keep readers turning the pages," remarked a critic in Kirkus Reviews. Amanda Craig, reviewing the book for the London Times, called it "a novel of complex ideas, for a reader already in love with literature."
Creates Compelling Fantasy Worlds
A young dragon named Firedrake leaves his valley home to find the Rim of Heaven, a mountain haven for dragons, in the fantasy novel Dragon Rider. Accompanied by Sorrel, a brownie, Twigleg, a homunculus, and Ben, a human destined to be a dragon rider, Firedrake must evade the dangerous and deadly Nettlebrand, a dragon hunter, to reach safety. "Readers will delight in the creatures that turn up in this extended quest," noted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, while Booklist critic Jennifer Mattson praised Funke's "whimsical line art" and stated that a "full-color foldout map adds the perfect atmospheric touch." Anne Johnstone, reviewing Dragon Rider for the Glasgow Herald, concluded that "Funke is such an instinctive storyteller in the traditional sense that this rollicking globetrotting adventure, starting in the Highlands, sweeps us along with apparent ease."
In The Princess Knight, Funke "handles the picture-book form just as deftly as her novels, with sure-footed pacing and a well-placed thrust through the cardboard princess stereotype," observed a contributor in Publishers Weekly. In this book, King Wilfred, the widowed father of young Violetta, decides that his daughter must learn the knightly arts of jousting and sword-fighting, and after many years of practice, Violetta proves more talented than her three older brothers. On the princess's sixteenth birthday the king announces a jousting tournament; the winner may claim his daughter's hand in marriage. An outraged Violetta disagrees with her father's plan and in order to thwart it she secretly enters the tournament as Sir No-Name. "The feisty heroine proves that determination can be mightier than the sword," wrote a critic in Kirkus Reviews.
A gang of pirates get more than they can handle after they kidnap a feisty young gal in another of Funke's picture-book offerings, this one titled Pirate Girl. When Captain Firebeard and his crew spy Molly out sailing alone, they snare her and put her to work scrubbing the deck of their ship. The resourceful Molly manages to place messages in some empty bottles and toss them overboard. Just when things look their bleakest, Molly's mother, a fearsome pirate known as Barbarous Bertha, arrives to save her daughter. Horn Book contributor Kitty Flynn called Pirate Girl. "a rowdy, satisfying seafaring adventure."
In an interview with Kate Kellaway in the London Observer, Funke discussed how she allows her stories to develop by following the actions of her characters: "I love my characters to take me for a surprising ride. You have to be confident enough to follow them. It is like walking to a cliff edge ... if you want to develop as a writer, you have to jump off--and fly." Speaking to Stephen Dalton of the London Times, Funke explained her love for writing: "If it wouldn't earn me money, I would have to earn money elsewhere and continue writing. The children always ask: when are you going to stop writing? And I say: when I drop dead. I can't live without writing. It's my obsession." Her advice for young people still undecided about their career path? "Take your time finding out what kind of work gives you so much joy that you could imagine doing it for the rest of you life. And then you can still change your mind completely halfway through your life and do something completely different."
UPDATES
October 2, 2006: Funke's book When Santa Fell to Earth was published by Chicken House. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, October 9, 2006.
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born 1958, in Dorsten, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany; married; husband's name, Rolf; children: Anna, Ben. Addresses: Home: Los Angeles, CA.; Agent: Oliver G. Latsch, Mühlenkamp 63b, 22303 Hamburg, Germany.
AWARDS
Zurich children's book award, 2000, Vienna House of Literature award, 2001, and Torchlight prize, Askews Library Services, 2003, and Massachusetts Children's Literature Book Award, 2005, all for The Thief Lord.
CAREER
Writer and illustrator. Designer of board games; ZDF (German state television channel), designer.
