Dragon Rider #1: Dragon Rider New Award-winning author/illustrator

Cornelia Funke is the hugely successful author of the Inkheart Trilogy, The Thief Lord and a whole host of other popular children’s novels and picture books. She was born in 1958 in the German town of Dorsten. After finishing her studies, Cornelia worked for three years as a social worker. For a while she illustrated books, but soon began writing her own stories, inspired by the tales that had appealed to the children she had worked with.

During the late 1980s and the 1990s, she established herself in Germany with two children’s series, namely the fantasy-oriented Gespensterjäger (Ghosthunters) and the Wilde Hühner (Wild Chicks) line of books. Her international break-through came with the fantasy novel Dragon Rider (1996), which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 78 weeks, and was continued with The Thief Lord (2000, translated into English in 2002), which immediately climbed to the #2 position of the New York Times bestseller list, stayed there for 19 weeks and sold 1.5 million copies.

Her follow-up novel was Inkheart (2003), which won the 2004 BookSense Book of the Year Children’s Literature award. Inkheart was the first part of a trilogy which continued with Inkspell (2005), which won Cornelia her second BookSense Book of the Year Children’s Literature award (2006). The trilogy concluded with Inkdeath (published in Germany in 2007, England in Spring 2008, USA Autumn 2008). Inkheart the movie was also released in 2008 and starred Brendan Fraser, Helen Mirren and Paul Bettany.

Cornelia’s brand new novel Reckless is released worldwide on September 14th 2010.