Inkheart is Cornelia Funke's most successful novel as yet. The Junges Theater Bonn, producer of the world premieres of Cornelia Funke's Dragonrider' and 'The Thief Lord', was granted the rights to produce Inkheart exclusively as a musical in German language. The world premiere is scheduled for Spetember 1, 2006.
One cruel night, Meggie's father reads aloud from a book called Inkheart - and an evil ruler escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. Meggie must learn to harness the magic that has conjured this nightmare. For only she can change the course of the story that has changed her life forever. This is Inkheart - a timeless tale about books, about imagination, about life. Dare to read it aloud. this fantasy reinforces the value of reading as well as taking responsibility for your actions.
About the novel:
'Inkheart' was Cornelia Funke's first novel to be published simultaneously in Germany, in the United States, Australia, Canada and in the UK. It led the bestseller lists in several countries for many weeks and turned out to be Cornelia Funke's greatest success as yet. Hollywood-based film producer ‚New Line’ ('The Lord of the Rings') prepares to start shooting of the Inkheart-movie in Fall 2006.
About the production:
The JTB's production of 'Inkheart - The Musical' will feature a cast of 20 actors and a band of five professional musicians. All adult roles will be performed by professional actors, while professionally trained children will take the parts of the children (Meggie and Farid).
About Cornelia Funke:
The German author, Cornelia Funke was born 1958 in Dorsten, Westphalia. Following university, she worked for three years as a social worker in an educational project, working with children from difficult backgrounds. Following a post-graduate course in book illustration at the Hamburg State College of Design, she worked as a designer of board games and as an illustrator of children's books. Disappointment in the way some of the stories were told, combined with her desire to draw fabulous creatures and magical worlds, rather than familiar situations of school and home, she was inspired to write her own stories for young readers.
During her time as a social worker, she had worked with children from deprived backgrounds and discovered the sorts of stories that grasped their imaginations. These were the stories she wanted to write – ones that would appeal to bookish children and to inspire those children who hadn’t had yet had positive reading experiences.
Cornelia Funke researches for each novel meticulously. For example, before writing Inkheart, she researched about booksellers, book collectors, book thieves and even book murderers as well as reading about martens and fire eaters. She then imagined the characters and the places they might go, writes down plot lines for the first 20 chapters. Then, and only then - after about six months – she writes the first sentence. A major novel will take her about a year to write. She always does her own sketches – in pen and ink (her grandfather was a famous etcher), she creates a picture of her own characters to help her write about them.
Visit the website of Cornelia Funke's U.S. publisher Scholastic