Eva Ibbotson was an Austrian-born British novelist, known for her award-winning children's books as well as her novels for adults – several of which have been successfully reissued for the young adult readership in recent years. Eva Ibbotson was born Maria Charlotte Michelle Wiesner in Vienna, Austria in 1925 to non-practising Jewish parents. Her father, Berthold Wiesner, was a controversial physician who pioneered human infertility treatment, recently found that he was actually the father of maybe 600 of the children his clinic helped to born. Her mother, Anna Gmeyner, was a... successful novelist and playwright who had worked with Bertolt Brecht and written film scripts for G. W. Pabst. Ibbotson's parents separated in 1928 and what followed was a " very cosmopolitan, sophisticated and quite interesting, but also very unhappy childhood, always on some train and wishing to have a home" as Eva Ibbotson would recall later.
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