She is, however, a woman whose fairytale success has just met real tragedy. Her husband Rolf, the father of their two children, died of cancer a few months ago after one year into their idyllic new life in California. Having written so poignantly about loss, pain and grief, she is managing her own bereavement with tremendous dignity.

“The difference between writing for children and writing for adults is that with children, you always have to have hope. You can’t let hope go” she says, in perfect, slightly accented English.  “My present situation, in which my children have lost their father and I have lost my partner, the person I spent 25 years with, 24 hours a day, is probably one I will never get used to. He inspired me creatively, he was my collaborator and my first reader. His influence is everywhere. We can only deal with sad times because we had such good times. He died without pain, which was a blessing, and he was not afraid. It’s like Goethe says, the gods give everything to their beloved, the great grief and the great joy.”

Funke’s intense seriousness, shot through with a quicksilver sense of humour (Funke means “spark”, appropriately), is the kind of distinctively German sensibility which has almost been forgotten on these shores. It taps into all that is wonderful about Grimm’s fairytales – the vigour, the quirkiness, the instinctive sense of mystery – while recoiling from their racism and cruelty. Where English children’s classics have children losing their parents as quickly as possible, Funke’s novels tend to include parents as protagonists. Mo, Meggie’s father in Inkspell, shares the adventure and the magical power as they search for Meggie’s lost mother.
 
Funke became the breadwinner of the family, writing and illustrating forty books while Rolf, a former printer, took care of the children in order to be as involved with their kids as possible. Like Philip Pullman, Funke understands that what intrigues children most is the power of the adult world: in The Thief Lord, one child chooses to become an adult in a magic roundabout that speeds up or reverses your age. Her own family were all book-obsessed, and her lawyer father took her weekly to the local library in Westphalia, where she read her way through everything and discovered English authors.  (Her favourite children’s novel is TH White’s The Once and Future King, closely followed by Tolkien and CS Lewis.)

“I still remember the first moment when Lucy opened the wardrobe to Narnia, and I thought, I have all those wardrobes of my own. I became a carpenter of wardrobes,” she says with a touch of mischief. Writing the second book of the Inkheart trilogy turned her into a “mad woman scribbling at night, in the cab, on my travels. I opened a door and all these characters ran out.”

Inkheart, and its sequel Inkspell, have a simple but wonderful premise: what if a gifted reader could actually read themselves into a story? Both Mo and his daughter Meggie share the gift of being able to make people from our world disappear into the world of Inkspell, and make people from Inkspell appear in our world in their place. An exploration of the gift and limitations of story-telling, it abounds in wonderful metaphors and dramatisations for creativity. Yet what is particularly strange is that Funke succeeded in getting Inkheart filmed partly because she based Mo on The Mummy film star Brendan Fraser while writing it, and sent him a copy. His interest in playing the part of Mo, which developed into firm family friendship, helped the film get commissioned by New Line.

“I wrote Brendan into my life,” she says, smiling. “He said how strange it was to find somebody on the other side of the planet who knew him so well.”

The current Renaissance in children’s literature is one she views as “a really large bloom, an exceptional situation, which it’s very nice to be part of,” while being aware how rare it is for authors to be a success in more than one country – Pullman she says is almost unknown in Germany, just as the American authors Kate di Camillo and Jerry Spinelli are here. Her new life in California was funded by her sales as a writer, long before the film money came rolling in, and although she is grateful for the sensitive support of new friends there, it’s clear that she is someone who lives, to an exceptional degree, inside books, language and her own creative world.  

“Germans don’t write fantasy,” she says. “I think in a way we’re a little scared of our own tradition because we had the Fascists grab so many myths. I hope the new generation will be able to grab them back and feel free to use them again – in a responsible way.”

The Times, May 2007