Eva Ibbotson

Eva Maria Charlotte Michelle Ibbotson (née Wiesner; 21 January 1925 – 20 October 2010) which she later fictionalised as Delderton Hall in her novel The Dragonfly Pool. Originally, she intended to become a physiologist like her father, and earned an undergraduate degree from Bedford College, London, in 1945. During her postgraduate studies at Cambridge University, she met her future husband, Alan Ibbotson, an ecologist. where they raised a family of three sons and a daughter.

Appalled by the thought of having to make a career out of conducting experiments on animals, she decided to discontinue her pursuit of scientific research. She briefly became a teacher in the 1960s before embarking on her writing career. She died at her home in Newcastle on 20 October 2010, having just edited the proofs of her last children's book, One Dog and his Boy, and started work on another children's ghost story to add to her long and successful series.

Through her father, Ibbotson was half-sister of the writer Paul Newham and the Canadian filmmaker Barry Stevens, but never met them.

Career

Eva Ibbotson began writing with the television drama Linda Came Today, which the British "Television Playhouse" series broadcast in December 1962. Her first English-language book was The Great Ghost Rescue, a juvenile fantasy novel A film adaptation of The Great Ghost Rescue was completed in 2011, directed by the French Yann Samuell. The Haunting of Hiram C. Hopgood was adapted by Gail Gilchriest.