in the US, using a translation by Anthea Bell. Originally translated by Oliver Latsch, Dragon Rider was published in English in 2004 by The Chicken House in the United Kingdom and Scholastic Inc. And I had so much fun drawing the sea serpent.Dragon Rider (original title: Drachenreiter) is a 1997 German children's novel by Cornelia Funke. Of all the creatures I invented he is still one of my favourites. I can still smell all those mushrooms brought by children who knew how much Sorrel likes to eat them. I wanted to draw dragons and all the strange creatures that live with them. And I learnt that longer stories quickly gain a life of their own.Īnd there was one more reason to write Dragon Rider.

While I wrote that new story I didn't feel like turning it into a TV series anymore and so now there's just the book.Īfter Dragon Rider I kept coming up with ideas for thicker and thicker books. Well, you can't just make a story longer and so I decided to write it anew and in a slightly different way. Someone wanted to make a series out of it and asked me to make the story a little longer. So I simply imagined it – something I have always been rather good at.īesides, the book goes back to some ideas I used for my very first book 'Die grosse Drachensuche'. I wrote Dragon Rider because flying on a dragon was the one thing in life I really wanted to do and I knew that writing about it was the closest I would probably come to the actually experiencing it. 'Time to turn east!'Įveryone who knew my first dog, Rico, will know that Firedrake looks a little like him.

Firedrake!' The dragon turned his head to her. This way we'll be in the mountains before daybreak. 'Wonderful!' said Sorrel, smacking her lips. Take a look in my backpack and hand me a mushroom, will you? One of the little black ones.' Ben did as she asked. 'It's wonderful! It's - oh, I can't describe it!' 'Personally I always feel sick to start with,' said Sorrel. 'Do you feel sick?' 'Sick?' Ben looked down to where roads wound through the darkness like gleaming snail trails. 'Well, how do you like it?' Sorrel called to Ben when they had been flying for some time. Night enfolded them in darkness and silence, and soon the world of men was no more than a glitter of lights far below.

Holding his breath, Ben clung tight to the spines of Firedrake's crest. The dragon spread his shimmering wings and took off.

The dragon rider cornelia funke