Cornelia Funke

Cornelia Funke is a German writer known for The Thief Lord (2002), Dragon Rider (2004), and the Inkheart series. Her work has led to global success, and Time named her among the 100 most influential people in 2005. She also won the BookSense Book of the Year Award for Inkheart in 2004.

Cornelia Maria Funke was born in 1958 in Dorsten, North Rhine-Westphalia. She grew up near fields, old mines, and factory chimneys. She has said, “My parents called me Cornelia Maria, and I was the oldest of their four children.”

As a child, she wanted to be an astronaut and watched the moon landing with fascination. She later said she invented new Star Trek episodes for her brother each evening.

Funke studied pedagogy at the University of Hamburg. After finishing her degree, she worked for three years as a social worker with deprived children. She has explained that “all the wild children I met taught me what kinds of books I should write.” She drew and painted with them, which led her to study illustration. While illustrating, she wrote her own stories when she disliked the texts publishers handed her. Cornelia wrote her first story at twenty-eight.

During the late 1980s and the 1990s, she became a noted writer of children’s fiction in Germany. She created the Ghosthunters series and the C.H.I.X. books. Her rise in the English-speaking world started in 2002 when The Thief Lord was translated into English. The book reached major bestseller lists and was adapted for film in 2006. Dragon Rider followed in 2004 and stayed on The New York Times list for many weeks. A sequel appeared in 2017.

Funke gained further attention with Inkheart (2003). The book won a BookSense award in 2004 and began a trilogy continued by Inkspell (2005) and Inkdeath (2007). She moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to take part in the film adaptation of Inkheart. The film was released in 2008. She returned to large-scale fantasy with Reckless in 2010 and completed further volumes in that sequence.

She has also written picture books, including The Book No One Ever Read (2017), which she wrote and illustrated in English. She has said that ideas “come from everywhere and nowhere,” and that characters often “step into my writing room” fully formed.

Cornelia Funke married Rolf Frahm in 1979 and has two children. The family lived in Hamburg before moving to Los Angeles in 2005. Her husband died in 2006.

In 2021, she settled in Tuscany. She supports several charities and serves as a patron for projects that aid young people.

Photo credit: Michael Orth