Originally, she intended to become a physiologist like her father, and earned an undergraduate degree from Bedford College, London, in 1945. Wiesner attended Dartington Hall School, which she later fictionalised as Delderton Hall in her novel The Dragonfly Pool (2008). The experience of fleeing Vienna was a strong thread throughout Ibbotson's life and work.

Other family members also escaped from Vienna and joined Anna and Eva Maria in England, avoiding the worst of the Nazi regime, which had already affected the family. In 1934, her mother moved to England, settling in Belsize Park, north London, and sent for her daughter. Her father took up a university lectureship in Edinburgh, while her mother left Vienna for Paris in 1933 after her work was banned by Adolf Hitler, putting a sudden end to her successful writing career. What followed for Eva was, in her words, a 'very cosmopolitan, sophisticated and quite interesting, but also very unhappy childhood, always on some train and wishing to have a home,' as she later recalled. Wiesner's parents separated in 1928 when she was two years old. Her mother, Anna Wilhelmine Gmeyner, was a successful novelist and playwright, who had worked with Bertolt Brecht and written film scripts for Georg Pabst. He is now believed to have used his own sperm to sire perhaps 600 of the children his clinic helped to be born. Her father, Bertold Paul Wiesner, was a physician who pioneered human infertility treatment. Wiesner was born in Vienna in 1925 to non-practising Jewish parents. Her last book, The Abominables, was among four finalists for the same award in 2012.

She was a finalist for the 2010 Guardian Prize at the time of her death. The historical novel Journey to the River Sea (Macmillan, 2001) won her the Smarties Prize in category 9–11 years, garnered an unusual commendation as runner-up for the Guardian Prize, and made the Carnegie, Whitbread, and Blue Peter shortlists. Some of her novels for adults have been reissued for the young adult market.

She is known for her children's literature. Paul Newham and Barry Stevens (half-brothers)Įva Maria Charlotte Michelle Ibbotson (née Wiesner born 21 January 1925 – 20 October 2010) was a British novelist born in Austria to a Jewish family who fled the Nazis.

Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson