Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 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 returned to college, graduating with a diploma in education in 1965 from the University of Durham. She briefly became a teacher in the 1960s before embarking on her writing career. Ibbotson's husband died in 1998. Being "too sad to write in her usual humorous style", she then wrote her ecological classic Journey to the River Sea. 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 published in 1975 by Macmillan in the UK and Walck in the US, with illustrations by Simon Stern and Giulio Maestro respectively. Children's books Ibbotson wrote more than a dozen books for children, including Which Witch?, The Secret of Platform 13, Dial-a-Ghost, Monster Mission, Journey to the River Sea, The Star of Kazan, The Beasts of Clawstone Castle, and The Dragonfly Pool. She won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for Journey to the River Sea, and has been a runner up for major awards in British children's literature several times. WorldCat libraries report holding Which Witch? and Journey to the River Sea in more than five and ten languages respectively. The books are imaginative and humorous, and most of them feature magical creatures and places. Ibbotson has said that she disliked thinking about the supernatural, and created the characters because she wanted to decrease her readers' fear of such things. Some of the books, particularly Journey to the River Sea, also reflect Ibbotson's love of nature. She wrote Journey in honour of her husband, a former naturalist who had just died; the book had been in her head for years. Ibbotson had said she disliked "financial greed and a lust for power", and often created antagonists in her