Cornelia Funke – Die offizielle Homepage

"Everyone who knew my first dog, Rico, will know that Firedrake looks a little like him. But Rico also couldn't fly. I wrote Dragon Rider because flying on a dragon was the one thing in life I really wanted to do and I knew that writing about it was the closest I would probably come to the actually experiencing it. So I simply imagined it – something I have always been rather good at."

Besides, the book goes back to some ideas Cornelia used for her very first book "Die grosse Drachensuche". Someone wanted to make a series out of it and asked her to make the story a little longer. Well, you can't just make a story longer and so she decided to write it anew and in a slightly different way. While she wrote that new story she didn't feel like turning it into a TV series anymore and so now there's just the book.

"After Dragon Rider I kept coming up with ideas for thicker and thicker books. And I learnt that longer stories quickly gain a life of their own."

And there was one more reason to write Dragon Rider. Cornelia wanted to draw dragons and all the strange creatures that live with them.  She can still smell all those mushrooms brought by children who knew how much Sorrel likes to eat them. And then there is Twigleg, the manikin. Of all the creatures Cornelia invented he is still one of her favourites. And she had so much fun drawing the sea serpent.

Since Dragon Rider had been published,  Cornelia has received countless letters and emails from readers, who wished for a sequel. Thus, Cornelia swung herself up on Firedrake's back again to find out, how Ben and the Greenblooms and all the others have been since their last adventure. So she entered the fabulous world of  Mimameidr and all its fantastic inhabitants.

Have a safe flight and exciting journeys with Firedrake and his dragon riders!

But.... one day Jacob Reckless stepped into Cornelia's writing house and he brought a world that was very different from the one she had left behind just a few months ago. It was far more modern and closer to our world. In fact it felt like its younger sibling. At the same time it brought back all the tales that she had grown up with.

"Over the past years I got completely lost behind the Mirror and for the first time in my writing life I can imagine to explore an imagined world for many many years to come. In fact I cannot imagine to ever fully leave it again. There are so many themes to explore behind the Mirror - time, magic, technology, things lost and found. There are so many countries and their fairy tales whose Mirrorlands Jacob and Fox can travel through."

And then there are the characters Cornelia met in this new world... Jacob, who sometimes feels like her male alter ego and Fox, who of all her characters is probably closest to her heart and self. There are Will and Clara and the Dark Fairy and Chanute and Alma ... and of course the Goyl. Cornelia still needs to find giants behind the Mirror and dragons.....

Welcome beyond the Mirror!

"I had much fun writing the four adventures, especially inventing the ghosts and all the tools Hetty and Tom use for hunting them. And I found out that my Inkheart-readers who normally feed only on thick books like them as well."

So, put on some red clothes and chase your first ghost. It can get slimy and sometimes rather silly, but maybe you'll enjoy it as much as Cornelia does. And if you know about any ghosts she didn't write about yet, let us know!

"I wanted Meggie to see that world, Mo, Elinor..... I wanted to see it myself! No, Cornelia, I said to myself. No, no, no. There are more than enough series and trilogies in the world of books. Don’t add another! But the story would not stop whispering. So I finally gave myself two weeks to find out whether it was really waiting, whether there was a story to be told . It poured onto the paper so fast that I almost couldn’t follow."

There has never been a book before, that was easier to write than Inkspell, and when Cornelia realized how sad an ending it would have, she knew she had to write a third book. She was not sure whether the story would close with it until she wrote the very last chapters. She still remembers how she first stepped into Inkworld with Dustfinger. "Of all the chapters I ever wrote this is one of my absolute favourites... not for what it turned out to be, but for the pure pleasure it brought to write it. A world formed in front of my eyes, formed from words, as Fenoglio had done it. I felt it, saw, smelled and heard it. It became more real with every step Dustfinger took and I loved it as much as he did. When I brought Meggie over I had to enter it in a very different way. With her I could show how frightening a new world can be, the disturbing feeling of leaving everything that’s familiar behind."

Inkworld is a medieval world. Cornelia always loved that time of history despite its cruelty and hardship. Life was harder, but people knew more about life and death, about the rhythm of nature, they were more connected to the planet they lived on, for good and bad, and in many ways the structures and rules were much simpler than in our time and age - which makes a wonderful canvas for a storyteller. Of course Inkworld is not a truly medieval world. After all it was created by a writer, but as every imagined place all the inspiration comes from this world.

"I was then quite familiar with "real chickens", for my husband and I had chickens ourselves. Besides, I was reminded of stories about spiky, strict grandmothers, that people had told me before, and at my husband's school there was a boys' gang whose first target was he.

By now there are hundreds of gangs in Germany, which call themselves C.H.I.X., girls that dye their hair red to look like Charlie, fathers who have to build chicken houses in their gardens, and by now even three film adaptations. Cornelia really hopes that her English speaking readers will take them to their hearts just as much as her German readers did.

So, off to feathery, carefree summer adventures!